


all will not be as it was (but it will be true)

by impossibletruths



Series: black days like bright ones [1]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Everybody Lives, Everybody Lives Is Perhaps Overstating It A Little Bit, F/M, Fix-It, Overzealous Use Of Nature Imagery And Symbolism, Pining, Road Trips, The Lunyx Road Trip We Should Have Gotten
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-21
Updated: 2017-06-04
Packaged: 2018-11-03 02:08:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 35,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10957461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/impossibletruths/pseuds/impossibletruths
Summary: All he remembers is waking up, wrung-out but still alive, and her leaning over him with a smile, and her voice, "Welcome back, hero."Nyx cuts a deal with the Lucii: his life in exchange for the fulfillment of his promise to see Luna safely to Altissa. Two weeks on the empty road with an army closing in around them as the world falls to pieces he can manage. Two weeks with Lunafreya, heart open and bloody and hers, well. It's almost more than he can take.[or, an everybody-lives fix it fic with the roadtrip we deserved, lots of pining, and something in the shape of a happy ending]





	1. Departure

**Author's Note:**

> there's a disappointing dearth of lunyx fic in the world so I wrote some. I thought it was gonna be a short, happy roadtrip story, but I was wrong. all knowledge of ffxv is secondhand. artistic liberties have been taken.

_but I am learning slowly_  
  
_to love the dark days, the steaming hills,_  
_the air with gossiping mosquitoes,_  
_and to sip the medicine of bitterness,_  
  
_so that when you emerge, my sister,_  
_parting the beads of the rain,_  
_with your forehead of flowers and eyes of forgiveness,_  
  
_all will not be as it was, but it will be true_

 

 

_“We will grant you our light. But know it will set when the sun rises, and the price for it will be your life.”_

_A worthy trade, he thinks through the pain and exhaustion; to give hope to others he need keep none for himself. What’s one man compared to the future of a world?_

_He is ready to sign, to swear his life away; the words rest at the tip of his tongue. And then––_

_“No.” The voice of King Regis interrupts his easy agreement, ponderously slow and low enough to echo in his bones. “I have given this one a task.”_

_“He fulfills it.”_

_“Not yet.”_

_“You are young to challenge us.”_

_“Actually,” Nyx grunts out, reaching for the fraying rope of hope; whether to save himself or hang himself he does not know, “maybe you should listen to the new guy.”_

_The kings rumble their disapproval, but if he cared for their approval he wouldn’t be here cursing them for their uselessness, their apathy. The giants around him shift; he gets the sense he’s missing out on some sort of argument. He stifles a comment about wasting time. He’s said his piece; he’ll pay whatever he must to keep her safe. To give someone out there the chance for a brighter dawn._

_After what feels like an eternity––it cannot be more than a handful of seconds, but time is strange in this in-between place––the Lucii speak, sound washing over him like the pounding surf._

_“Very well. Our gift shall hold until daybreak. As for you life, you may keep it so long as you keep your duty.”_

_Nyx grins, bloody and crooked and victorious around the pain. “A bargain. Great. Where do I sign?”_

* * *

The air smells like rain.

It’s a round smell, rain, heavy and electric, and the princess stirs next to him, tucking flyaway hair behind her ear as she leans out the window to feel the breeze. He spares a momentary glance away from the road––it’s empty anyways, not like anyone’s going to run into them if he takes his eyes off the winding asphalt for a second––and eyes the grey clouds gathering overhead. Just their luck, really.

Though, maybe it’ll finally wash the scent of smoke out of the air. That’ll be something.

“You should roll up your window, highness,” he says, eyes back on the road. She pulls her head inside and turns to look at him; he catches a glimpse of her hair swinging around out of the corner of one eye. “Might get damp.”

“A little rain has yet to harm anyone,” she tells him, but she rolls up the window anyways, cranking the handle so that the glass creeps up in fits and starts. Sealed off like this, the air in the car is still and dry, and the A/C rattles and does absolutely nothing to alleviate the late spring heat. In the still air, he’s hyperaware of everything: his breathing, her breathing, the sweat gathering down his back, the smoke-and-flowers scent of her. He keeps his eyes fixed on the road. It winds on, a ribbon of asphalt through the dusty no-man’s-land stretching in every direction. The grey rain clouds blot out the sun, hang heavy and low over the world. Behind them, they blend in with the smoke rising from the shattered remains of the city.

He turns his eyes to the road. The past is what it is. Only way to go is forwards, hero.

The rain starts slow, an unsteady patter of droplets on the windshield that swells to a sweeping downpour. Wind gusts past them, kicking up water and churning dust to mud in equal measure until the road disappears in a hazy grey sheet, and the need to run––to drive as far as they can without stopping or looking back, to get her as far as possible from the burning city in their wake––wars with common sense.

If it were only him, he’d keep on until the rain stopped or he ran out of gas. But it’s not, and he’s got a duty to see to, so he eases the car from the road and turns it off, engines giving a final splutter that is swallowed by the sluicing rain.

She looks at him, eyes curiosity-sharp. “Why are we stopping?”

“Too dangerous to drive,” he replies, rolling the building cramp out of his neck. “I’m supposed to keep you safe, not get you killed in a car accident.”

She looks like she wants to argue––her lips purse together, mouth narrow and challenging––but she doesn’t. “Very well.”

It’s a little unnerving, the acquiescence, especially since she hasn’t agreed to a single thing in the entirety of this mess. Even their seating arrangement had been an argument. He’d wanted her to sit in the back, where he could keep an eye on her, but––

(“You are not my chauffeur.”

“Actually, princess, I am. And your bodyguard.”

“Then you may guard me better from the front seat.”

And, well, he doesn’t argue with that.)

He shrugs. “You may want to get some sleep.”

The look she fixes him with could force the king to–– could force anyone to bend a knee. He frowns right back.

“You have been driving since daybreak,” she says. “If either of us needs rest, it is you.”

“I’m supposed to be looking after you. Maybe you forgot?”

“I can look after myself for an hour.”

“Princess––”

“We are not going anywhere while this rain keeps up, no?”

He frowns. “No,” he allows, slowly.

“Then rest while we have the protection of the weather. I will wake you when it clears.” He presses his lips together, trying to decide how much he wants to argue––a lot, actually, even though she has a point; maybe he wants to argue _because_ she has a point––and her face softens. “Trust me,” she tells him, and something in his chest loosens.

“As soon as this lets up,” he says, a warning or a request or–– things get fuzzy around her, don’t fit quite so neatly into place. He thinks he sees the hint of a smile in the lines around her eyes.

“I promise.”

He believes her.

The rain makes for a sweeping lullaby, a steady hum all around, and the inside of the car is warm and still and smells of the princess, smoke-and-flowers, and he before he knows it he is asleep.

* * *

He wakes to a hand on his shoulder and an ache in his neck and a weariness that digs into his bones, and in the hazy moment of confusion between sleep and wake he thinks he’s fallen asleep in a transport, half-expects to blink his eyes open to Crowe’s fond exasperation and Libertus’ teasing and Pelna steady equilibrium.

Except. The air smells like flowers and smoke and rain, still and musty, and the voice quietly murmuring his name belongs to no Glaive he knows. His eyes snap open and he sits up in a rush.

The princess flinches back and he shakes himself out of it, forces his shoulders to drop, evens his breathing. This is no troop transport. They are not on their way to the front lines because there are no more front lines.

“What time is it?” he asks, and what he means is––

“You slept not quite an hour,” she replies, understanding. “The rain has let up.”

It has, leaving a hazy grey mist in its wake. He runs a hand through his hair and rolls his neck.

“Thanks.”

“I promised,” she tells him, eyebrow cocked ever so slightly, as if saying _I told you so_. He lets it go, wipes the sleep out of his eyes instead.

“Should be a gas station coming up. We’ll refuel, get some new clothes. Something less princess-y.”

She doesn’t protest, because she’s smart and knows the two of them can’t drive across the country dressed as Oracle and Glaive without drawing far too much attention to themselves. Though the thought of seeing her in something so everyday as blue jeans is–– is––

He scrubs the image of Lady Lunafreya in something so mundane as jeans and a t-shirt out of his mind and wrestles the car into gear, pulling back onto the road in a squelch of mud and exhaust.

“You should sleep,” he says as they pick up speed. The wipers slide lazily across the windshield, flicking aside the film of rain gathering on the glass. “I’ll wake you up when we get there. Promise.”

She hums something that sounds like agreement and goes quiet; when he chances a look over at her she’s leaning against the window with her eyes closed, hair escaping from its complicated braids and curling around her face. He drags his eyes back to the road and their long circle west away from the city. He’s here to protect her. _Not to look. Not to listen. Not to think._

Yeah, well. Look where that got them.

He fiddles with the radio to give himself something to do, static fuzzing out a song he’s fairly sure is popular right now. The sound clears as they drive, singer crooning about squandered love, and he sighs and turns off the useless air conditioning unit and taps along to the melody, Insomnia a curling pillar of smoke to their left as they eat up the miles to the next bastion of civilization. 

* * *

They pull into Hammerhead as the sun begins to set, light slanted and golden through the awning of the rest stop now that the clouds have broken up and the mist has burned away. The light catches on the dripping eaves, makes the whole gas station glitter like it’s more than chrome and engine grease.

He wakes the princess with a cleared throat, and she blinks slowly back to consciousness. There’s a red mark on her forehead where she’s been pressed against the window and her complicated braids are well and truly ruined, and he can’t scrub away the smile creeping across his face at seeing her so normal.

“Rise and shine, princess.”

She stifles a yawn behind a hand, and his smile grows. “Where are we?”

He nods to the sign slowly rotating above them. “Hammerhead. Gas station.”

“Have you the gil?”

“I’ve got enough.” He’s got what’s on his person, which should get them what they need: gas, fresh clothes for the princess, food. They’ll be roughing it from here on out, but that can’t be helped. Speed––getting the princess to whatever modicum of safety they can find––is the most important thing, now.

She brushes her hair out of her eyes, makes a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it face at her pale reflection in the windshield. “How may I assist?”

“Just, keep a low profile,” he says. “I’d like to be quick.”

“You hope to continue through the night?”

“I hope to keep going as long as we can. The quicker we get you where you’re supposed to be––”

Her expression clouds, but all she says is, “Yes, of course.”

He peels off the layers of his uniform before getting out of the car; it is far too recognizable. Then again, so is the princess, but there’s not much to do for that besides hope the mess in Insomnia is keeping people off the roads, or that she looks out of place enough that no one recognizes her.

He wasn’t made for this espionage crap.

The door shuts hard behind her as she steps out of the car, and for a moment he watches her stretch through the window before tossing the mass of his gear into the backseat and joining her. The air is cooler than it was earlier, washed clean by the rain. He shivers in his shirtsleeves. She seems unfazed by the chill, ash-stained hem of her dress drifting with the breeze.

“Here.” He flips her ten gil over the roof of their banged up, borrowed ride. “For gas.”

“Where are you going?”

“Shopping. Try to stay out of trouble.”

“I’ll do my best,” she promises, and she’s wearing that hint of a smile again, as if at least part of this is a joke. Which, well, maybe it is. _A princess and a soldier pull up to a gas station..._

Someone’s got a terrible sense of humor.

For a moment he wonders if it’s even safe to leave her here while he ducks inside the shop, and the moment’s hesitation catches in his chest, sends adrenaline surging through him, and he curls his hands into fists at his side so he will not reach for his knives––which are half useless, he can’t use that magic anyways, the king is dead, and–– _Focus, Ulric._

He takes a breath. The princess is staring at him, concern painted across her face. He unclenches his fists.

“Are you alright?”

“Yeah.” There’s not even anyone else here; the station is practically deserted. _Get it together._ “Yeah, I’m fine. I’m gonna find you something less, uh, conspicuous. What d’you think about hoodies?”

She ignores the joke. “I will be fine,” she promises, like she can read his fucking mind, and he wants to be irritated but mostly it just soothes his nerves, loosens the tightness in his chest.

He turns his back and strides into the shop before he can say something he’ll regret, pokes through the paltry selection of pre-packaged foodstuffs and spends more time than he’d like chatting up the shopkeep, trying to figure out where he can buy a clean shirt. Turns out they only sell tourist gear here.

“But if you try Longwythe down the road––”

“Great, thanks. How much’ll this cost?”

In the end, it’s more gil than he’d like to spend but he comes away with an oversized hoodie, Hammerhead Station emblazoned across the front in mustard yellow, a pack of six plain white t-shirts, a handful of toiletries, and some gas station junk food with little-to-no nutritional value. He adds a scarf to the mix, a soft blue thing, ostensibly so the princess’ll be warm but mostly for reasons he refuses to admit to himself. He tips the shopkeep for his help and brings the bundle back to the car.

The abandoned car.

His heart plummets and his pulse jumps. He dumps the bag in the back seat and looks around, but there’s no one out here, no one except a young blonde leaning against the wall outside the garage.

“Where’s––”

“Your girl?” asks the blonde with a cocky little smile. “Went to freshen up.”

“She’s not my girl,” he says, automatic. The blonde’s eyebrows climb.

“Right, course not. Don’t need to worry though, she’s just over there.” The blonde points, and if he cranes his neck around the gas pump he sees her, hair a simple braid, Crowe’s hairpin glinting in the evening light, some of the ash and dust cleaned off her face. She meets his eyes across the lot and smiles, and the tightness in his chest eases.

“Right. Thanks. Um…” She wears no nametag. Not that there’s really anywhere to put one, given the amount of clothing she isn’t wearing.

“Cindy,” she fill in with a wide grin. “This is my granda’s garage, but he’s a little tied up at the moment, so if there’s anything you need, you just ask me.”

He offers a smile, a little forced but serviceable. “Thanks, Cindy.”

“No problem.” She leaves with a wink, curls bouncing. The princess joins him, glancing between Cindy and the car.

“Is everything alright?”

“Yeah, fine. Here.” He rummages through the bag for a moment and holds the hoodie out. “Best they’ve got.”

The idea comes to him in a flash, and he shoves the tourist crap into her hands before dashing after the upbeat blonde. “Hey, hey! Cindy!”

She pauses in the opening of the garage, one eyebrow raised. “You decide you need something after all?”

“Know anywhere here I could buy some clothes?”

“Well, we sell some stuff at the shop––”

“No, I mean. Real clothes. Something, uh, normal.”

Her expression goes cautious, almost calculating. “Wha’d’ya mean by normal?”

Nyx glances back over his shoulder at the princess. The oversized Hammerhead hoodie clashes horribly with the fine material of the dress underneath. She smiles when she catches him staring and he snaps back around to Cindy, ears warm. She frowns at him, setting sun throwing shadows across her face.

“She’s really not your girl, is she?”

“No.”

“She’s the princess.”

So much for going unrecognized. “Uh. Yeah.”

Cindy settles her hands on her hips. “Thought she was in Insomnia. Wasn’t she supposed to be getting married?”

Nyx hesitates. There’s no real way to beat around this particular bush. She’s going to find out sooner or later. So he grits his teeth, and––

“Niflheim invaded. Insomnia’s fallen.”

She blanches, sagging like the air’s been knocked out of her. He’d love to take a moment to soften the blow but they’re short on things like time and gentle truths these days. “We need to get out of here, to meet the prince. If you can do anything to help...”

She gathers herself carefully, straightens, sets her thoughts in order. “Right, yeah. Um, just wait here a sec.”

“What––” he starts, but she’s already gone, disappearing into the gloom of the garage. A moment later she returns with a man, half-familiar.

The man frowns, giving him a long once-over. “Who’s this, Cindy?”

“This is my grandad, Cid Sophiar,” she introduces, and he recognizes the man’s face, and relief sweeps through Nyx. “Grandad, this is, uh––”

“Nyx Ulric,” Nyx answers. “I’m a member of the Kingsglaive.”

Sophiar perks up. “The Kingsglaive! What’re you doing at my pit stop out here?”

“Insomnia’s fallen,” says Cindy, and Sophiar’s excitement fades as quickly as it arrived. He nods slowly, sighing long and heavy, as if he knew. Seems to be a lot of that going around these days.

“So that’s why,” he mutters to himself, and doesn’t deign to explain. For a moment he stares across the garage, empty and distant, before he shakes himself, eyeing Nyx. “What d’you need, boy?”

“Anything you can spare.” He’s not about to pass by any bit of luck they can scrape together. “Change of clothes, food––”

“I’m sure I’ve got something Lady Lunafreya can wear,” Cindy volunteers.

“We’ll pay of course,” Nyx promises, and Cindy exchanges a look with Sophiar, one he can’t read.

“We’ve got a trailer, if you want to stay the night,” Sophiar offers. Nxy shakes his head.

“Appreciate the offer, but we need to keep moving.”

“Well, if you change your mind,” Sophiar shrugs. “Cindy’ll bring you something to wear. Best get back to your princess, Glaive.”

His princess. Heh.

“Thank you,” he replies, and the old man waves him away, already turning back to whatever work has his attention. Nyx watches him go, wonders if he should say something––apologize, ask if there is anything he can do, say something more than just _thanks_.

In the end, he just sighs and steps out of the shadow of the garage into the shimmering blue of the gathering twilight. 

* * *

“Is everything alright?” the princess asks when he joins her again. The gas pump blinks zeros, tank full.

“Some good luck,” he tells her, tugging the gas nozzle out of the car. “This is Cid Sophiar’s place.”

“The king’s friend?”

“Yes.”

“Ah.” She’s quiet for a moment, long enough that he looks up from feeding coins into the gas pump and look at her. She looks tired, wan and hollow. He looks back to the pump, clicks the nozzle back into place, keeps his hands busy so he will not have to look at her, will not have to think about the slow-moving horror rippling out around them. “Does he know?”

“Yeah,” he nods, pressing his lips tight together for a moment as his jaw works, gathering himself. “I told him.”

She nods, hands pressed against the side of the car, and he turns towards her, hand outreached to offer, what? Support? Companionship? His undying loyalty?

He’s already given her that. That and his life, but apparently fate has a particularly fucked up sense of humor, because he chose to die for her but here he is, still standing at her side, and all he can think to be is thankful.

Cindy saves him from himself, bouncing up with a canvas shoulder bag in one hand and a plastic takeout bag in the other.

“Clothes,” she says, holding the bag to the princess. “And provisions.”

“How much do we owe you?” Nyx asks.

“It’s on the house.”

“We can’t––” the princess begins, trying to hand the bag back, but Cindy shakes her head, reaches out a hand to stop her.

“It’s nothing, really. They’re just a couple old things I was gonna drop off at one of those resell shops next time I made the trip to Longwythe. You’re saving me the trouble, swear.”

“Oh.” The princess glances between the bag and Cindy’s outstretched hand, expression inscrutable. “Are you certain?”

“Yeah, Lady Lunafreya. Anything to help, it’s a real honor.”

“Thank you. And many thanks to your grandfather. You have done us a great service.”

“Our pleasure. Are you sure you don’t want to stay the night?”

The princess looks to him, and he shakes his head, almost imperceptible. They can’t waste the time, not if they want to make it to Altissia before the Nifs pick up their scent. Stopping at all is a risk, but part of seeing the princess safely out of Lucis is making sure she arrives in one piece, which means things like rest and food and keeping a low profile. Surely they can manage two out of three.

The princess favors Cindy with a smile. “I’m afraid we cannot. There is too far yet to go.”

“Well then. Safe travels, your highness. I hope you find the prince soon.”

“Us too,” Nyx says, yanking the passenger-side door open so he can drop the warm food within. Cindy nods a goodbye and takes her leave. For a moment the two stand there. The princess’s hair glints under the bright station lights.

“You should, uh. Go change,” he says, mostly suggestion. “I’ll take the hoodie.”

“But I like it,” she protests with a twinkle in her eye that has him snorting.

“Sure you do, highness.”

She’s smiling that faint little smile again, the one that catches under his skin and tugs, and he grits his teeth together and watches her leave, eyes scanning the rest stop. There’s no one else here; even the skies are clear after the day’s rain. He can’t pinpoint the source of the buzz at the back of his head, the way his the hair at the back of his neck prickles. Ozone in the atmosphere, maybe. Trouble on the horizon, certainly.

Promises made, perhaps. _Our hope goes with you now. Keep your duty._ A shiver scrabbles up his spine, chill digging in deep, and he shakes it away, eyes combing the station again.

Still nothing.

His arm throbs. Carefully he uncrosses them and rubs at the knot in his shoulder, clenches and unclenches his fist. His skin feels tight and brittle around his bones, and now that he’s looking he can see the spiderweb cracks where the ring’s magic coursed through him, left him half-dead. He brushes the lacework scar across his cheek; it’s hot to the touch.

The princess returns while he’s got the pads of his fingers pressed to his face, slipping into his field of vision in ill-fitting cargo pants and a loose blouse. The breeze picks at the strands of hair that have escaped her plait to frame her face. She looks like something that has drifted in from a dream, utterly unlike the carefully-composed princess insistent to talk upon the rooftop not three days ago and also exactly the same: same iron spine, same gentle eyes, same unyielding fire, same effortless grace.

She stutters to a stop a few feet away from him. “What?” she asks, head cocked to the side in concern. He lets his hand fall away from his face, tries to shove the complicated jumble of his thoughts out of his head. It’s like trying to cram the blood-and-muscle mess of his heart back into his ribcage, a lost cause before he even starts.

“Nothing, highness,” he manages. _Our hope goes with you now._ She’s more than a princess, and he has a job to do. “Ready to get going?”

“There are things for you here, too,” she says, holding the bag out. He takes it with a frown, expecting perhaps an old t-shirt of Cid’s, or maybe a pair of grease-stained jeans.

Neatly folded on top of Cindy’s hand-me-downs is the Hammerhead hoodie.

He can’t strangle the bark of laughter before it slips through his lips. When he looks up to meet her eyes, she’s smiling.

“Thanks. Uh, food’s still warm.” He grabs the takeout out of the car through the window, passing the bag to her before opening the passenger seat door so she can settle in. “Dig in. I’ll be back.”

He leaves her there, breathing in the smell of warm food, and trusts Cid and Cindy to keep an eye on things for long enough to wash the soot and ash out of his hair. He did what he could earlier, but he’ll be happiest when he can finally have a proper shower.

For now though, the sink will suffice.

* * *

He hasn’t, he thinks dully, seen himself since–– Well.

It’s not as bad as he thought. The scarring across his face is faint, a Lichtenberg fractal creeping across the his left cheek and up past his hairline. It catches the light at certain angles and disappears at others, alternately silver-white and gone. The burn on his arm is mostly-healed, angry pink in some places and the skin a little too smooth and soft for his liking, but otherwise fine.

Then there’s the scarring from the ring, like his face, lace lattice of thin pale lines around his hand and wrist and creeping up his arm, raised and smooth and hot to the touch, as though the ring’s magic still burns under his skin––even though it doesn’t, even though it burned away with the sunrise. He traces a finger along a spidering branch until it reaches his elbow and fades away. He clenches and unclenches his fist. His skin still feels too tight around his bones, but nothing seems wrong.

No more so than expected, at least.

There’s also a splatter-paint spread of bruises across his torso and back, and he can feel more down his legs. He dabs unhelpfully at the handful of abrasions across his chest where his armor didn’t dampen enough of the impact to keep from breaking skin, but that’s what happens when a couple dozen buildings fall on you. And he thinks he may have broken a rib or six––funny how you don’t notice those things until you stop to take stock.

He cleans off the ash and blood as best he can with a few paper towels and hand soap, brushes flakes of ash and concrete out of his hair with his fingers, washes his face and brushes his teeth with tepid tap water, and drags on a fresh shirt and the hoodie.

It really is comfortable. No wonder the princess wanted to keep it.

She’s still eating when he gets in the car, licking some sort of hot sauce off her fingers, and he’s not looking he’s _not_.

She pauses when he tugs the door shut behind him. “Would you like yours?”

“Later,” he says. “Oh and, uh. This is for you.” He holds out the scarf, soft and the color of the sea, and she carefully wipes her fingers on her napkin before she takes it.

“Thank you, Nyx,” she says, running the fabric through her fingers. He presses his lips together and drags his eyes away from her, flicks on the headlights and directs his attention to wrestling their stolen car into gear.

She wraps the scarf carefully around her neck and returns to her sandwich as they pull out of Hammerhead and press further on across Leide.

* * *

The dashboard clock reads 10:27 in blinking green figures when they pull off the side of the road, headlights cutting a swath of yellow through the darkness. They bump along for a few minutes, long enough for the uneven ground beneath them to wake the princess where she snores quietly next to him.

“Where are we?”

“Two hours west of Hammerhead,” he says, flicking the lights off and turning the car off. The desert wind whistles past them. “Give or take. Middle of nowhere. We can rest here and keep going in the morning.”

“Camping?”

“You can sleep in the car, highness. I’ll take the ground.”

“A gentleman, I see. There’s no need to–– oh, your face.”

She reaches out, hand closing around his chin so she can angle him in a specific direction, and he yelps. “Princess, what––”

“Is it hurting?”

“Why, cause it’s killing you?”

“No.” She frowns at him, runs a finger along the spidering scars on his cheek, and––

“Ow!”

He yanks his head back, hissing as pain blooms across his face, sparking beneath her fingers and radiating outwards like lightning, leaving spots dancing in front of his eyes. He clenches his teeth as the shocks fade.

“What the fuck was that?”

“Look,” she says, flipping on the lights inside the car and pulling down the visor so he can look in the tiny mirror there.

The faded lines of his scars are an angry red, creeping further across his cheek, and as he watches they flicker with the crackling fire of the king’s power. Experimentally, he opens one hand, expecting fire, but instead a spike of pain lances up his arm, and when he looks down at his hand the scarring there looks darker, almost ashy. Much fresher than it had been hours earlier.

_As for you life, you may keep it so long as you keep your duty._

Oh, those clever bastards.

The princess lays a careful hand against his unscarred cheek, angling him back to look at her, fingers splayed over scar tissue. “Let me,” she murmurs softly, and warmth bleeds from her hand like ink in water, slowly spreading across his face and washing the pain away. Her eyes flutter shut as she works, and he stares, afraid to blink, afraid to breathe.

(He was unconscious last time she did this, half-dead in the dawn light with Libertus standing guard and the smoke thick over the city. All he remembers is waking up, wrung-out but still alive, and her leaning over him with a smile, _Welcome back, hero._

Libertus gave him no end of grief for that before they parted ways, Libertus to mop up the mess of whatever cell he’d stumbled into and Nyx to see the princess safely to Altissia, and beyond.)

“Hand,” she orders, eyes still closed, reaching for his wrist. For a moment he doesn’t understand, then she tugs on his wrist and he lays his hand palm-down in her own. The half-familiar sensation of seeping warmth wells in his hand, caught between bones and skin, then rolls up his arm, leeching away an ache he hadn’t even noticed until it disappears. A furrow forms between her brows, a narrow tickmark marring the smoothness of her face, then she sighs and her eyes open, exhaustion painted across her face. “There.”

“Thank you,” he says, and his fingers tighten around her hand almost on instinct, and for a wild moment he thinks maybe he should bring her hand up, kiss her knuckles like the gentleman she jokes he is. It would be easy; she holds him just as as he holds her, fingers slim and strong and still warm from whatever gods-given power she wields.

But. She’s a princess, she’s the hope of a world, and he’s just a king’s soldier who couldn’t save his king, living on borrowed time. _Keep your duty._

He lets her go, and pretends not to notice the way she flexes her fingers as she slowly withdraws.

“I thought it had healed,” she tells him, like an apology, and he shakes his head.

“I don’t think it’s that easy. But, um. Thanks, princess.”

Her mouth twists, wry. “If we are to travel together, and in disguise, you must call me by my name. I would not want my title to give us away.”

“Right.” His mouth is strangely dry. “Lunafreya.” It feels like something akin to blasphemy, except he’s not really the god-fearing sort.

“Thank you, Nyx Ulric.”

He gets the sense she’s talking about more than just her name. He clears his throat.

“Right. Well. I’m gonna, uh, check the perimeter.” It comes out more of a question than a statement. Anything to get out of the cramped confines of the car, the buzzing in the air that makes his fingers twitch and burrows under his skin. She presses her lips together, nods her acceptance, and he slips out of the car into the soothing chill of the desert night.

He goes with the flashlight they found in the glove compartment and a kukri, sweeps outward in concentric circles, finding nothing but dust and rock. He takes longer than he needs, stays out until he can slot his thoughts back into something resembling order.

When he returns to the car, the princ–– Lunafreya lies curled in the back seat, hair across her face. She could be anyone, hand tucked under one cheek, shoes kicked off, mouth open and quietly snoring. It’s easy to forget, watching her sleep, who exactly she is. What she is.

Nyx digs the remains of his coat out from the back, dusts it off until it’s passably clean and spreads it over her, something to ward off the night’s chill. He tucks her hair behind one ear, gentle as he can. She turns into his hand ever so slightly, chasing the warmth, and he stills, afraid to wake her. But she merely sighs and burrows into the warmth of his coat. His heart beats double-time in his ribcage; every part of him wants to stay here, hand against her cheek while she sleeps, between her and the seeking monsters in the darkness, at her side as she crafts the future the world so desperately wants to see. Yearning wells in him strong enough to steal his breath.

He pulls away and she huffs quietly, hand curling tighter under her chin.

The front seat is hardly a comfortable bed, but he’s slept in worse. He tilts his head back against the peeling leather of the seat and closes his eyes, listens to the steady rhythm of her breathing behind him, quiet among the wind twisting around the car, the two of them the only living things for miles.

He’s so fucked.

* * *

When he blinks awake, there’s a strange woman outside the car.

He’s out the door before he can think, sleep burning away as he sinks into a defensive crouch familiar as his own heartbeat, weapons in hand and tension thrumming under his skin. A few ribs protest with a lightning twinge of pain that he firmly ignores in favor of assessing the threat.

It’s... well, it’s just a woman, actually, in a long black dress, chin tilted up slightly towards the sun rising on the horizon, eyes closed as if in meditation. Two dogs sit in front of her, a dark-and-pale matched set, tails wagging happily through the sand. Nyx narrows his eyes.

“Who are you?”

Behind him, the car door opens and slams shut again. “Gentiana!”

He relaxes, but only slightly, straightening so he can half-step in front of the princess, daggers still unsheathed. “You know her?” he asks Lunafreya, refusing to take his eyes off the woman.

“She is a Messenger. And a friend.”

Right. “And the dogs?”

“They are mine.”

Of course she has dogs that can find her out here in the middle of the desert. He doesn’t know why he’s surprised.

“I have come to speak with you,” Gentiana says, ignoring him entirely. Lunafreya steps up next to him, lays a placating hand on his forearm and he sheathes his kukris, making sure his displeasure reads clear across his face. “I bear important news for Oracle and girl.”

The princess turns back to him, sighs when she sees his expression. “I will be safe with her,” she promises, and he waves them away. This is one argument he doesn’t want to get into. Magic and battlefields he can deal with, talk of the gods and Oracles and mysterious Messengers he wants as little to do with as possible.

Though it looks like “as little as possible” is going to be a lot more than he’d like, watching Lunafreya and Gentiana speak together a good twenty paces off. One of the dogs, the pale one, barks. Nyx holds a hand out and both of them crowd in close to sniff, seem to find him acceptable because the dark one nudges under his hand so he can scratch him. He crouches in the dust behind the car, glancing up now and again to check in on Luna, as if she might disappear if he takes his eyes off her too long. _Keep your duty._

“She’s a good woman, y’know,” he says to the dogs. The light one rolls over so Nyx can scratch her belly. The darker one sits back on his haunches and pants, tongue lolling. There’s something tied around his chest but he shies away when Nyx reaches for it, so he lets it go. “Not an ounce of sense, but a good woman.”

The dark one barks. Nyx hopes it’s agreement.

Eventually Lunafreya returns, her ethereal friend watching from a distance, eyes closed and expression utterly unreadable. Nyx keeps an eye on her while the princess kneels to murmur something to the dogs, who sit up and listen attentively. She doesn’t look much like a Messenger, or whatever he expects a Messenger to look like. Maybe there’s something slightly ageless about her face.

“Have you a pen?”

Nyx looks down. “What?”

Lunafreya is knelt in the dirt, sand pressed into the knees of her pants, one hand shielding her eyes as she looks up at him. “A pen. Have you got one?”

“I think there’s one in the glove compartment.”

She pushes herself to to feet and goes to the car, opening the door to rummage through the front seat while Nyx watches, bemused. Eventually she makes a small sound of victory and emerges with a pen in one hand to perch on the edge of the seat, one foot kicking through the dust and the other propped up on the running board as she bends over something. He trails her around the car, leaning against the side of the trunk to watch her write.

She doesn’t look up from her writing pen scratching across a page of cream-colored paper, but does respond to his looming with an answer to the question he’s telling himself not to ask. “It is a notebook I share with Noctis. A way to pass messages, from when we were young.”

“Passing love letters, princess?”

“Giving him news of our survival.”

Something in his chest tightens. “Right.”

“And I thought I asked you not call me princess.”

“Old habits,” he says in the shape of an apology, and she spares him a glance, lips twisting up in the shadow of a smile.

A moment later she finishes writing, calls the dogs to her with a whistle and affixes the small book to the harness the darker one wears. She rubs each of them between the ears.

“Go now. Find him. Godspeed, my friends.”

They take off at an easy lope, following the bend of the road back in the direction they came from the night before and disappearing from view. Lunafreya stretches a moment, rolling out her neck and shoulders from a night sleeping in the back of the car, and slides more fully into the passenger seat, closing the door behind her. Nyx steps up to lean through her window.

She looks up, expectant. “Shall we continue?”

“What about your friend?” Nyx asks. Lunafreya cocks her head, curious.

“Which friend?” she asks innocently, and Nyx straightens to point out Gentiana waiting two dozen paces away from them only to be met with the empty desert.

“Wha––?”

“Gentiana does not require simple methods of travel like you and I,” the princess assures him. “It is kind of you to think of her.”

Gods and Messengers. Right.

He stops at the trunk as he circles to the other side of the car, rummaging through their meagre supplies to grab a box of powdered donuts. The trunk he slams shut with more force necessary, taking a moment to press a fist against the dust-coated paint. He’d like to say it’s not what he signed up for, but it is, and he’d sign again in a heartbeat if it meant doing even a little good. Even for the princess. Especially for the princess.

He feels slightly better when he slides into the driver’s seat.

“Here,” he says, passing the donuts to Luna. “Breakfast."

She picks at the seal with muted curiosity and he turns the key in the ignition, sends the engine sputtering to life. He eases his foot off the clutch and they pull forward, arcing a slow loop back to the road. Luna offers him a donut, fingers dusted in powdered sugar, and he pops it in his mouth, hoping the sugar will do something to wake him up. For a moment he misses coffee, then shakes the thought away.

Next stop, he thinks, shifting gears as they reach the road, picking up speed along the two lane highway twisting through the wasteland that spreads like a quilt around them. Next stop they’ll sell some of the things they don’t need, he’ll take a job or two, buy the princess a proper pair of shoes so she’s not running around in those heels. And maybe get some coffee.

It’s the little things in life.

“Would you like another one?” Luna asks, a spot of powdered sugar smudged along her jaw, and it sends something flaring to life in his chest, magic-hot and just as dangerous. He takes the pastry with a crooked smile he can’t tamp down. She shares it, mouth a gentle bow.

“You’ve got something there,” he says gesturing to the spot of white on her face. She blinks twice, raises a finger to swipe it away and sucks the sugar off her finger. The desert breeze whips through the open window, catching her hair so that it dancers around her face.

Nyx turns his eyes back to the road, allows himself a moment to hold tight to the warmth in his chest.

Yeah. The little things.

* * *

The road eventually ends in a T junction, a north/south split along the border of Leide. On the horizon he can make out the verdant plains of the Duscae region. Right in front of them, a red light stares them down. He turns on the turn signal, more out of habit than anything else; they’ve yet to see another car on the road.

“No,” Lunafreya tells him as the car blinks for the left-hand turn. “We need to go north.”

“Excuse me?”

“I must visit the Disc of Cauthess.”

He hopes she’s joking. “Not really the time for sightseeing.”

“It’s not sightseeing,” she says, almost cross, and it’s nice to know she’s got real feelings under the whole duty-and-honor routine. “I must awaken Titan.”

It’s a testament to the amount of utter shit that’s gone down these past few days that he doesn’t argue about the possibility of waking something he’s not even sure he believed existed a week ago.

That doesn’t mean he’s on board with the idea.

“No way.”

“It is my duty.”

“Did that strange woman this morning tell you that?”

“Gentiana is an unyielding ally and has been a friend since I was a child.”

He manages to keep himself from slamming a fist into the steering wheel. “Oh, for the love of––”

“If you will not go with me, I will go alone.”

“What, you’re gonna walk there?”

She’s looking at him with that same look she wore before she jumped out of a crashing airship into a warzone. “If I must.”

Does she have any idea how insufferable she is? Yes, if the subtle crook of an eyebrow is anything to go by.

He bites back a curse and flips the turn signal to the right. She smiles next to him, all grateful and genuine, and his heart tightens in his ribcage. He digs his nails into the steering wheel, flakes of cracked leather sticking to the pads of his fingers. “Thank you.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he grumbles. She leans over the shift and presses a kiss to his cheek.

“I mean it. I know this is not easy, Nyx Ulric. Thank you for your help.”

He can feel his ears go hot as they turn down the narrow, two-lane road that will lead them north towards Duscae. He drags his attention back to the road, knuckles tight around the wheel. “‘S what I signed up for, princ–– Uh. Lunafreya.”

“A willing choice does not always make burdens lighter,” she says at his side, and she sounds almost sad, and he doesn’t want to think about that, he doesn’t. He lingers on it anyways, thinking of her, and the prince, and the winding path before her, before them. _My duty is my destiny._

Yeah. She’s not the only one.

The radio splutters, three part harmony of a song he doesn’t know fuzzing out into static as they get farther and farther from Hammerhead, driving north into the foothills of the mountains where the highway will bring them west to the Disc. Lunafreya fiddles with it for a moment, then seems to decide it a lost cause and thumbs the thing off. No air conditioning and no radio. Wonderful.

Nyx cranks his window down to let in the breeze; Lunafreya rests her elbow on the frame of hers, fingers tapping along the roof. The wind catches her scarf, one end trailing behind her, a ribbon of color against the sepia dust of the desert. It flickers and dances out of the corner of his eye.

They drive for hours, wheels eating up the miles as the wind down the country road, twisting through the valleys of Leide, enormous pillars of rock standing guard above them. The emptiness stretches around them, miles and miles of nothing but dust and rock. Such space dwarfs them both, dares them to try to fill it, and Nyx does not even know where to begin. The quiet is almost a third passenger, welling between them. The hum of the engine is a faint, muted thing in the endless desert.

It sets Nyx’s teeth on edge.

“Why did you join the Kingsglaive?” Lunafreya asks suddenly into the whipcord-tight silence, cracking it wide open, and Nyx’s hands tighten around the steering wheel at the unexpected sound, car wobbling slightly with his surprise. It takes him a moment to gather his thoughts.

“The king saved my life when I was a kid,” he answers slowly. “I wanted to serve. Repay that debt, I guess.” Not that he did, in the end. Years he put into the Glaive, _for hearth and home_ , and there’s not a single one now that isn’t out there burning and broken.

They featured in his dreams last night, smoke and fire and rubble, the ruins of Galahd and Insomnia blurring together and his sister screaming above it all, high and frightened as she fell. It turns his stomach.

Lunafreya’s hand settles on his shoulder. He glances aside to her and back to the road, unwilling to meet her gaze. The weight of it presses upon him, firm and gentle both, and he can’t decide if it soothes or irritates.

Both, he decides. She’s good with paradoxes like that.

“What?” He doesn’t mean to snap, but the word comes out sharp anyways, barbed. She squeezes his shoulder.

“You did all you could,” she tells him. It’s the sort of thing that would be empty platitudes from anyone else but from her, he almost believes it. “You honor his memory.”

He swipes an angry hand across his mouth and digs into the gas pedal harder than necessary, car jumping forward.

“Sure,” he says. “Yeah.”

“You remind me of him,” she says, retracting her hand, and now he does look over, watches as she stares out the window, almost wistful.

“You knew him,” he says, invitation and question and statement all in one. She nods.

“He visited when I was younger. Before the occupation.” Bitterness wells in her voice, honest hatred, and he knows that flame, the one that burns deep in his gut and keeps him moving forward, keeps him paying out his own blood to keep other sheltered from helplessness and hopelessness in the face of the metal and magic war machine that casts its shadow upon the continent. “He tried to save me, when General Glauka killed my mother.”

His stomach churns at the reminder of Drautos’ betrayal but he firmly ignores it, glancing briefly aside at her. “Tried?”

The weight of her sigh could bend iron. “I chose to stay.”

“In Tenebrae?” He sees the shape of her nod out of the corner of his eye. “Why?”

“My brother needed me. The people needed me. I was––am––the Oracle. I could not abandon my home.”

His mouth pulls into a crooked line, a facsimile of a smile. “Duty again, huh?”

“Mine is a vital task,” she says, sounds more like she’s quoting than speaking for herself. “The Chosen King must forge a covenant with the Astrals to burn away the darkness at the heart of our star.”

“And that’s why you have to get to the Disc.”

“Yes.”

Nyx sucks in a deep breath, blows it out slow and even as the shape of things begins to take shape. It’s all myth and story, gods and monsters, the sort of thing he hasn’t believed in since he was a child, and he’s not sure he believes in it now.

But he believes in her. That’s enough.

“Seems like a lot of weight to put on the young King’s shoulders,” he says, grim and quiet.

“Yes,” Lunafreya agrees with a sigh, face drawn and tired, mask of certainty set aside for a moment. _Enough with the brave princess act._ “It is. And in the end, I can do little but stand by his side.”

“Hey,” he says, dragging her attention back to him. He takes his eyes off the road long enough to meet her gaze, make certain she knows he means what he says. “You’re not alone either. I’ll stand at your side as long as you need.”

Her face softens, and in a moment of weakness he thinks he might give anything for her to always look this gentle, to look so weightless. “Thank you, Nyx.”

“Anytime. Princess.”

The gentleness slips away, replaced by a tired sort of admonishment, and he lets himself grin wide as he turns back to the road, content with the point scored.

“Are you always so dismissive of authority?” she asks lightly. Nyx snorts.

“I’m not at liberty to say, ma’am.”

He feels her staring at him again. “So you can be professional.”

“When the mood strikes.”

“I can’t imagine you made many friends with the Lucian military.”

“We didn’t spent much time working with them.” He sighs, mind conjuring memories of nights on the front lines with the rest of the Glaive. “Mostly it was just us doing whatever the King needed. Holding the line somewhere so a town could be evacuated. Defending key points. Running the odd covert operation.”

“Like your friend who was sent to find me.”

“Crowe, yeah. She was a good soldier. Better friend.”

She hesitates. “I’m… sorry, Nyx.”

He swallows down the lump in his throat, banishes the memories to smoke. “Don’t be,” he tells her, and he thinks he manages to mask the thickness in his voice. “She knew what she was getting into. She be glad to know you’re safe.”

“And that you’re guarding me?” asks Lunafreya.

Nyx thinks she’d probably be giving him no end of shit, but he keeps that to himself. “Yeah.”

“I wish I could have known her.”

“Yeah,” he says, blink away the blurring of his vision that threatens to obscure the road. “Yeah, me too.”

They lapse into silence after that, but it’s a lighter one than that endured before, and Nyx feels a weight lifted off his chest as they press north.


	2. Connection

The blockade appears out of nowhere, a half-built hulking thing of concrete and metal crouching across the road as they turn the bend, and he doesn’t even have time to curse before the troopers arrayed in front of them raise their guns. He slams on the break, inertia yanking them forward as the car skids to a stop in a cloud of dust. The MTs step forward but he’s already throwing the car into reverse, tires kicking up smoke as he braces his hand against Lunafreya’s headrest and and twists around to see where they’re going. He peels backwards around the bend, spinning around once they’re out of sight and flooring it until they’re a good couple hundred yards away from the blockade. Only then does he bring them to a stop, hearts hammering.

He punches the peeling tan leather of the steering wheel.

“Shit.”

“We knew to expect such trouble.”

Yeah, they did––since when have the Nifs ever made anything easy––but he’d hoped they might have a little more time before the roads were cut off. It’s not the first time he’s seen this tactic, the empire moving in and cutting of routes of escape. He half wonders what’ll become of the refugees pouring out of Insomnia. Ducks in a barrel, he thinks grimly.

For a wild moment he contemplates taking it out. It’s only half finished; they won’t be expecting an assault from a pair of travelers without backup.

But that’s because it’s suicide, and his life isn’t his own to be spent without caution or care. It is owed to the Lucii, to the princess, to the future. Besides, he’s nothing without the king’s magic. Helpless, just like he was all those years ago when–– 

He refuses to let the past repeat itself.

“We’ll go around,” he decides. “Ditch the car, skirt south––”

“Leave the car?” she echoes. He pulls a face; he doesn’t like it either.

“We’ll be quieter. And quicker.” He knocks against the front console. “This piece of junk is in no shape to travel off-road.” 

She doesn’t seem convinced. “And once we pass the blockade?”

“We’ll find another car.” Her frown deepens. “Or something, I don’t know. But listen, you and I can’t take that thing,” he hooks a thumb in the direction of the blockade, “out by ourselves, and I swore I’d see you to Altissia. If we’re on foot we can cut through the hills and figure out transportation when we’re in Duscae proper.”

“And if there is none?”

“You’re the one who brought up walking.” He sighs. “Whatever it takes to get you where you need to go, princess, I promise.”

She holds his gaze for a long moment, searching, and eventually nods. “I suppose it’s our best course of option.”

“It’s not like we have many to choose from,” he mutters. She wears a mirror of his own irritation, mouth a thin line and eyes sharp.

It takes longer than he’d like to split up what few goods they have. In the end he shucks the Hammerhead hoodie and returns it to her so he can suit up in what remains of his uniform. It’s in surprisingly good condition, missing sleeve aside, and there’s something comforting about slipping back into his old skin. 

The food they have mostly eaten, and he sees no reason to save a bag of chips for their trek across the hills. Instead he clears out the glove compartment, dumps the eclectic mix of crap into the bag with Cindy’s castoffs and the handful of toiletries he bought back in Hammerhead. Lunafreya wears it across her body like it’s a school bag. What a pair they make, he in Glaive uniform and she dressed like a city girl on a class trip.

“We’ll head west,” he tells her, hand angling a line across the road and towards the rise and fall of the looming hills. “It’ll cut some time off the trip, at least.”

“Well then,” she says, shifting the bag more comfortably over her shoulder. “Let us go.” 

* * *

They don’t even get past the road before all hell breaks loose. 

The MTs come out of nowhere. Following the car, maybe, or running a patrol, or just out to make life hard for anyone foolish enough to venture into the region. Whatever the case, they get perhaps a hundred yards from the car when it goes up in a booming crash, a plume of fire and smoke twisting into the air, and when they turn around to stare at the explosion a dozen troopers are charging at them, weapons drawn and faces blank.

He breaks into a run, Luna hot on his heels. The MTs eat up the ground between them, moving faster than any living, thinking thing should be able to. But then, they’re neither living nor thinking, are they.

If they can just get to the hills, he thinks, half-prays. They’ll have cover there, they’ll have the high ground. Out here they’re open, exposed, easy targets.

Rifle fire thunders into the ground next to him; he ducks in surprise, nearly tripping over his own feet, and when he chances a glance over his shoulder the MTs are a few dozen paces away.

“Go,” he shouts, slowing his pace so the princess can pass him. “Get to the hills, I’ll cover you." 

“You do not have your magic,” she bites back, slowing as well, and he shoves her forwards, makes sure she stays in front of him. One of these days she’ll listen when things start falling apart around them.

“I’ll be fine,” he promises. “Your safety is most important, princess. Let me do my job.”

She hesitates, looks like she wants to argue––of course she wants to argue––but instead she nods, short and sharp, and redoubles her pace. He slows to a stop, blades out, waiting for the troopers to reach him. No magic, he reminds himself, years of training pared away to the basics.

Well, what’s a hero without a little challenge every now and then?

The advance guard he cuts through like butter. His daggers dig into the first, one to the neck and the other through the chin, pressing into weak points hard enough to snap the thing’s head around. He kicks off its torso, driving it into the ground and stealing its momentum to leap at the other one, landing hard on its shoulder and sending it buckling down. One dagger drives down through the top of the skull and the other wrenches up beneath the chin with enough force to yank its head clean off. He falls with it as it crumples, rolling away from the sparking remains and back onto his feet, eyeing the group approaching at a sprint.

With a shout, he charges them.

One dagger bullseyes into the center of an MT’s chest and he follows in a leap, yanking his kukri free, metal sparking against metal. He brings the other dagger up to dig into the back of its neck but spins free instead, barely scratching the armor as gunfire thuds down into the ground behind him, sending sand spraying up. He ducks an axe, presses in close under the swing and twists around to hamstring one of the troopers. It collapses under its own weight, arms still scrabbling, and he slams both daggers into its back as he rolls away from the mass of them, gunfire trailing him through the dirt as he backpedals out of range.

Three down. Nine to go. 

He misses his magic like a limb. He feels slow without it, sluggish and exposed. A dozen infantrymen would be nothing if he could call fire or lightning upon them, if he could warp from one to the next, but his wings are clipped and what would have been an easy cleanup is looking like an uphill battle. He shifts his grip around the hilts of the weapons in his hands and braces himself.

They come faster, red eyes glowing with empty, eerie light, and he presses in close, finding the weak points in their armor and whittling them away. One goes down with a dagger through the eye, electricity sparking around its head; another crumbles under the gunfire of a third when Nyx dodges out of the way just in time to avoid the hit himself. He comes away panting, spitting blood into the dust from where one caught him in the face with a stray elbow. The rest just keep coming. He cuts down a third and gets sent flying for his troubles, the hilt of an axe between his shoulderblades, and the impact ripples down to his still-healing ribs. He lands face-down in the dirt and picks himself up slowly, breath coming in short gasps.

He sees the red light on his chest a moment before he hears the crack of gunfire, and as he throws himself to the side the bullet catches him in the arm. For a moment his arm goes numb, and then pain flares from ear to fingertips, the whole of his left side screaming, and he bites out a curse as his fingers spasm around the hilt of his dagger. He rolls over his right shoulder and comes up kneeling, good arm outstretched as he sends the other dagger spinning back in the sniper’s direction, satisfaction settling in his gut as it strikes home in the center of the thing’s face, sending it over backwards. He swaps hands, keeping his left arm pressed close to his body, and falls into a defensive crouch, kukri in a reverse grip. The six remaining troopers close in on him; he gets a lucky strike in on one of them, dragging an arc through the metal-and-magic torso as he twists around, backpedaling, making certain he stays between them and the princess. The MT collapses in the dirt and dust.

Five on one. Pretty terrible odds. Seems about right.

“C’mon then,” he grins, copper taste of blood thick on his tongue. They raise their weapons as one, a semicircle of steel around him.

The blow comes out of nowhere, axe whistling down past his ear and cleaving through one of the MTs at the shoulder before whipping up to decapitate the thing. Nyx follows the arc of the battleaxe back around to Lunafreya, her hair pulled back, expression stone-hard. The princess spins the axe around her back and brings it up, blocking a blow from an MT aside so it thunders into the ground instead of Nyx’s skull, and brings up the butt of the axe in the other direction, knocking a third MT away. She steps in front of him, wielding the axe like it weighs nothing, twirling it in concise circles in front of her, carving through the magitek troopers. She ducks one blow, leaps over another one, sends a trooper stumbling past her into Nyx’s range and he sweeps its feet out from beneath it, digging his dagger into what passes for its spinal column as it crashes into the dirt, dust and sand puffing up around it.

When he looks up again she’s got the last one on its knees. Her axe slices through its neck and returns to a ready position at her side. The MT lingers upright for a moment before the head tumbles to the side and its body slumps over in the other direction.

Lunafreya turns back to him, hair drifting around her face, axe at her side, a faint bruise blooming on her cheek.

He’s never seen anyone so beautiful.

He pushes himself upright, swiping his good hand across his mouth and coming away bloodied. His ribs protest every breath, and his arm may very well be on fire, but they’re both alive, so he’ll count it a win.

“I thought I told you to go,” he says, limping over to yank his kukri from the sniper’s face. Luna watches him go.

“I have had enough of leaving others to die for me,” she tells him, voice almost toneless. He wipes the blade on the outside of his pants and sheathes it before facing her. Her face is eerily still, regal and distant.

Well, two can play that game. He schools himself into something like parade rest as best he can with fire lancing up and down his arm, face smooth.

“I know what I signed up for, princess,” he tells her.

“What good is guarding me if you cannot see me to my destination?”

“No one ever said I had to survive the trip.”

“I cannot imagine you would do any good protecting me were you dead.”

“Hey, you’re the one with this destiny. I’m expendable." 

Her eyes narrow. “I do not ask for your life.”

“Well, it’s yours,” he tells her, and he doesn’t mean it like that, so blunt and honest. She stares at him, eyes slightly wide, and he wants to take his heart and shove it back into his ribcage but he can’t because it’s already out in the open, beating small and quick and bloodied in the palm of her hand, and vertigo sweeps over him, and he tells himself it’s blood loss.

“Nyx,” she begins, and he cuts her off with the sharp shake of his head, braids hitting his cheek.

“Forget it,” he says, and vertigo sweeps over him again and oh, maybe it _is_ blood loss. He sinks to his knees, impact jarring up his body and settling in his ribs and arm. The ground rocks beneath him. 

“Nyx!”

“I’m fine,” he lies, and then she’s kneeling in front of him, fingers soft against his face, chest, arm.

“You are not,” she says, admonishing. He winces.

“I’ve been worse,” he says, and that’s true at least. She shakes her head, examining the bullet wound in his arm. 

“You foolish man.”

“Look who’s talking.”

Her finger press into the bloodied skin around the bullet wound and he hisses.

“You are lucky,” she says. “The bullet missed bone. It is only a flesh wound.”

“Yeah, great. I feel lucky.”

“Can you make it to the foothills?”

Right. They’re exposed out here, and who knows when the Nifs will come looking for their missing patrol.

“Yeah, yeah. Here, help me up.”

She takes his hand and drags him upright, stronger than he expected. She doesn’t have the bag with her but that’s fine; they can deal with triage once they get to safety. 

Once he’s standing she lets him go, and he rocks a moment but stays on his feet. She grabs the axe off the ground, holding it in front of her with both hands, eyes closed, and he watches in awe as the weapon glows softly, light spilling through her fingers and all around her, bright enough to leave spots in against his eyelids, and when it finally fades a double-sided trident rests in her hands, burnished silver. Lunafreya digs the the end of it into the ground, bracing against it and breathing heavily for a moment, then straightens. She holds it with an easy familiarity, twists it in a few simple circles, sketching neat curves through the dusty air, and nods to herself, satisfied.

Nyx just stares. She looks to him.

“Shall we?”

“Uh,” he says intelligently, blinking the spots away. He’s heard of the Lucian line of kings calling weapons to their hands––he remembers, vaguely King Regis doing the same when he was still a boy in Galahd, a show of power that has stuck with him all these years––but this seems beyond that. Maybe one day the princess will stop surprising him. He doubts it. “Yeah.”

They make their limping way across the no man’s land that is the Leide-Duscae border, shrubby vegetation of the wasteland fading into bristling grasses into the gentle, rolling slopes of the Malacchi Hills. They come across no one save a Niflheim scout who Luna dispatches with practiced ease, trident quick and lethal in her hands.

They pick up the bag on their way, tucked behind a rock on the other side of the road. Apparently she didn’t get far before she came back for him. Irritation flares in him that she ignored his orders so easily, but it wars with a healthy dose of gratitude. He really he doesn’t know what he expected.

They finally stop when the sun reaches its zenith, well out of sight of the blockade. Nyx eases himself down against a boulder, unclasping his coat with one hand and shrugging awkwardly out of it, doing his best not to jostle his bad arm. Lunafreya sits cross-legged at his side, bag on the ground next to her. She checks over his wound.

“It is not lodged in your arm, at least.”

He leans his head back against the boulder, eyes drifting close against the sun’s glare. “Oh, good." 

There’s the sound of rustling and then the shock of damp cloth against his arm jolts him up again. Luna frowns in concentration, cleaning the area around the wound. He pushes her hand away, struggles upright as she puts a hand against his chest to keep him still.

“Hey, I can deal with that, princess.”

“If you must throw yourself into danger for my sake, the least I can do is help you heal.”

“Highness––”

“It will be a long walk to the nearest town. Let me help.”

Her tone brooks no argument, so he shuts his mouth and lets her clean his arm and shred a shirt into neat strips, folding the cloth into squares and wrapping them tight to his arm. He grits his teeth. He’ll need stitches, he thinks. Something to add to the list.

She finishes her work by passing him a makeshift sling, and he eases it over his head, flexing his left hand carefully. He can feel his fingers, which is promising, and he can still move all of them, so all in all it’s not too bad. Luna sits back on her heels and surveys him.

“Your face is worse,” she says softly, fingers hovering above his skin, close enough that he can almost feel their warmth. He smiles, a crooked thing, half-grimace and humorless, and feels the pull of the ring’s scarring, too hot beneath his skin.

“Save your strength,” he tells her. “I’ll hold up for a while.”

“You should do more than simply hold up,” she tells him, but her heart doesn't quite seem in the argument. She moves to stand and he reaches for her hand before she can, tugs her attention back to him.

“Thank you,” he says, “for saving my ass.” He squeezes her hand and lets go. She stares at him long enough that he has to look away, fiddling with the fraying edges of his makeshift sling under her scrutiny.

“You’re welcome,” she says finally. Her hand drifts into his field of vision, and he looks up to find her standing above him, arm outreached to help him up. He takes it and stands, settles his feet into the earth and breathes deep. The air smells full out here, all grass and loam, fresh and new.

“Should be able to make the far side by nightfall,” he says, nodding westward. The sun slips behind a cloud high above them and he shrugs his coat back on. Luna waits, patient. “You good?”

She shifts the bag across her shoulder. “Yes.”

Carefully, slowly, they set off through the hills, sun dappling their path west into Duscae. 

* * *

They make it to the rest stop as the sun touches down on the horizon, building glinting and highway a ribbon in the pooling golden light of the late afternoon. He feels Luna sag next to him, exhaustion seeping in now that their destination is within reach.

It’s not much of a rest stop, barely more than a bus station, but it’s nice to finally be among civilization again. Luna pulls her scarf up over her head, hiding her hair and shadowing her face, and Nyx sheds his coat. They pause at the foot of the hill, take a moment to rebandage his arm, and Luna releases her trident––it has been more walking stick than weapon for their hike through the hills––and it disappears in a shower of silver sparks. Adequately––well, not adequately; he still wishes they could forgo this entirely, but short of hunting for their dinner they’ve nothing to eat and like it or not, he needs medicine––masked, they arrive at the rest stop.

The parking lot is nearly empty, and the interior of the stop is similarly bare. Nyx sweeps the place, catalogues the three travelers sitting around the table, the mother and child poking through coloring books on the far side, the proprietor behind a counter and a younger woman working the food station. Three exits, one in the front and two marked with a little green man running through a door. Shelves for potential cover. Smells like something greasy and warm. His stomach rumbles.

“Hello there!” the proprietor calls, a stocky, balding man. “Welcome to Rick’s Rest Stop. I’m Rick. You two be needing any help?” He smiles at them, cheerful, but there’s a second question layered beneath his voice and the beginnings of concern written across his brow, and Nyx figures a little truth might go a long way.

“Yeah,” he says, stepping up to the counter, out of earshot of the trio eating across the room. “Do you buy as well as sell?”

“If you’ve got anything worth selling,” he says, slow and uncertain, and more of his cheer fades away. Probably at the scarring across his face, Nyx thinks, and now he wonders if he should have let Lunafreya heal it earlier. “What’s your story, friend?”

“We’re refugees,” Nyx tells him. “Headed for––” Ah, shit, what’s near here? “Lestallum.”

“Refugees?”

“From the capital. You heard?" 

Rick swallows. “Yeah. Didn’t believe it myself.”

“Believe it, friend.”

The man nods. “Well, what’re you selling, then?”

In the end the unload everything they don’t need, crap from the bottom of his pockets and the car’s keychain and the extra clothes in Cindy’s bag. Nothing fazes the man until they produce Luna’s dress, ash and dust ground into the fine lacing. It’s far too nice a thing for them to have with them looking like they do, Nyx knows, but Rick just looks between them as if things have clicked into place.

“What’s this then? Wedding dress?”

“Yes,” Luna replies smoothly. Nyx’s brain shorts out. “The attack was–– ill timed.”

Rick looks uncomfortable. “Oh. Well, uh, congratulations. And, sorry.”

“Thank you,” Luna says graciously while Nyx chokes on his own tongue and cycles through approximately sixteen emotions, settling on something between horror and a leaping hope, which he immediately crushes beneath his proverbial boot.

They get a good price for the lot of it, “on account of you being newlyweds and all, mazel tov,” and with it get things they sorely need: shoes for Luna, painkillers and a first aid kit, and tickets to Lestallum on the night bus. Afterwards there’s gil enough left over for dinner tonight, and then some.

They’ve three hours to wait until the bus arrives, though, so Nyx retreats to the rest stop bathrooms for a good twenty minutes and emerges with some stitches and a fresh bandage. Luna wordlessly passes him his dinner when he sits across from her at one of the tables near the food station, far away from the trio of roadtrippers dressed like they’re on their way to a mountain resort. Apparently news of the capital’s demise isn’t going to stop them vacationing.

Nyx digs into his noodles with vitriol, as though they’ve personally wronged him, and looks up now and then to see Luna carefully finishing her own dinner, utterly unfazed and wholly focused on her meal. He gets halfway through his own before he shoves the noodle cup away and braces his good hand on the table.

“What the hell was that about?” he hisses, leaning forward and keeping his voice low, intensely aware of the others in the station. Lunafreya looks up, finally, face utterly serene.

“You wished to remain hidden.”

“Not like this! You’re engaged, we’re on the way to your _wedding_ ––” 

“Then no one shall suspect me traveling under this guise.” 

“I–– that’s not––” 

She tilts her head slightly and sets her food aside. “It is only so far as Lestallum. I did not think it would bother you so.”

“It doesn’t,” he snaps, and then closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, because if it didn’t bother him he wouldn’t be arguing with her over noodles in a rest stop in the middle of nowhere with the same dozen songs playing on the local radio. He glances aside at the other travelers but they seem well and truly occupied with their own business.

“It doesn’t,” he repeats, calmer. And he cannot deny that it was clever, now that he stops to consider it. A simple yes has assuaged curiosity and given them reason to travel together. “A little heads up might have been nice, though.” 

“Perhaps a proposal, then?”

“Hilarious, princess.” He sighs, and tugs his food back towards himself with a minute shake of the head. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have snapped.”

“And I did not intend to make you uncomfortable.”

“I–– You didn’t.” 

“There is a long journey ahead,” she says quietly. The song on the radio changes, something slow and a little sad. “I do not doubt your conviction, but should you wish to walk it alone...” She trails off under the weight of his gaze.

“Do you think so little of me?” he asks.

“No, of course not, but I do not wish to presume. If you want to leave––”

“I don’t,” he says before she finishes. That is simple enough, that certainty at the core of things. Forget his oath, forget his duty. He could not leave her if he wanted to, but he does not want to, has not wanted to since she stood before the ailing king and spoke easily of death and destiny in the face of the greedy, uncertain future. “I won’t abandon you. I made a promise, remember?”

“I would not hold you to it,” she says, soft. 

“Now, princess,” he says with a crooked smile, and he thinks of the ancient kings. _Keep your duty._ “What kind of hero would I be if I couldn’t keep a promise?”

Her expression turns sad, almost sorry, as though she knows the price he has paid, as though she has seen how this will fall out. But then, she is the Oracle, isn’t she?

“I have faith in you, Nyx Ulric. I am glad to have you at my side.”

“Happy to be here,” he tells her, and means every word of it. He’ll stand here as long as she’ll have him, even if it kills him. 

* * *

She spares a moment to heal him before the bus arrives. He stands still beneath the awning of the building and she stands before him, one hand against his cheek, washing the lingering claws of the ring’s magic away with gentle eddies of her gods-given power until the ache around his eye fades. When that is done she takes his hand with both of her own, eyes closed as if in prayer. Soft light bleeds from her fingers, masked by the flickering fluorescents hanging above them.

Afterwards she is slow to let go, and he allows himself the momentary comfort of stroking his thumb along the narrow curve of her wrist, murmurs his thanks to the crown of her head where she stands bowed before him.

“I am afraid it will not heal,” she says softly, lacing her hands together and looking up at him. He fears he does not mask his acceptance quick enough; her brow furrows. “You knew.”

“It probably just needs a little more time,” he lies. 

“Nyx––"

“I knew what choice I was making, princess,” he assures her. “I’d make it again.”

Her lips press together, make her mouth small and pale. “You are a foolish man,” she says finally.

Nyx grins. “Yeah, I am.”

“Thank you,” she tells him, heavy and swift as a sigh, and he blinks.

“For what?” 

She doesn’t reply, only shakes her head and holds her hands tight in front of her, as though she must keep them close for fear they might act without her consent, and Nyx cannot decide if he truly wants to know. 

In the end, the rumble of the approaching bus saves him the trouble of making a decision, and the opportunity to press passes him by.

* * *

The bus drives through the night, and the steady hum of the engine and rock of the carriage eventually lulls him to a half-sleep, an uncomfortable doze that comes and goes as passengers whisper around him and the bus changes speeds, each little shift setting him on edge again, waiting for something to go wrong.

The princess sleeps, at least, scarf slipping down around her face while she snores quietly––little more than a huff, really––head turned into the side of the seat.

(When he does manage to sleep he is plagued dreams, memories old and new: Crowe stares at him with empty eyes; Drautos says _for hearth and home_ and cuts him down laughing; Regis pushes his son forward out of the shadows and the prince looks him in the eye and demands, _why didn’t you save him_ ; his sister stares up at him as she falls and when he blinks she wears the princess’ face. He jolts awake, her name caught in his throat, and for a blurred, panicked moment he cannot remember where he is. Then Lunafreya shifts at his side, murmuring phrases in lilting Tenebraen, and it quiets his racing mind and heart. 

When he doses off again, he is strangely weightless, lighter than he has felt in a long time.)

The miles between the rest stop and the relative safety of Lestallum burn to exhaust as the bus trundles on through the night.

* * *

“Alright, people,” says the bus driver, bright and cheerful as the early morning sun through the windows. “Here we are.”

Nyx stirs slowly, limbs thick and heavy and a hollow ache throbbing in his neck from sleeping upright. He stretches slowly, greeted by the familiar twinge of his ribs and light across his face and the smell of stale air conditioning and socks. The buzz of exhaustion clouds the back of his mind, settles over everything like a haze.

“Breakfast, ladies and gents,” the driver continues. Lunafreya blinks awake next to him, dark bruises beneath her eyes. He’s not the only one who’s been having trouble sleeping. “Look alive, we’ve got half an hour.”

“Where are we?” asks the princess around a yawn, stretching catlike in her seat while other passengers file out. There aren’t many of them, not quite a dozen strangers traveling in ones and twos, and no one so much as looks at the battered-looking pair as they pass. But then, more than a few sport their own slow-healing wounds and the ragged, tired look of refugees. The more things change, right?

For a moment he wonders what is happening in Galahd, now that the king’s meagre protection has fallen, and the thought turns his stomach.

“Not sure,” he replies, turning his thoughts in a more productive direction. He steps into the aisle so the princess can stand. “Still in Duscae, I think." 

“What time will we reach Lestallum?”

“Late. It’s a day and a half across the region.”

She purses her lips and says nothing as they exit the bus into town.

Town is a generous term for it. It’s not much more than a dozen buildings clustered off the main highway. They one they’ve stopped at is a long, low, single storied thing, more parking lot than structure. Closed umbrellas poke out of a handful of wind- and rain-worn picnic tables out front and the faded sign above the door reads _Marta’s Stop n’ Shop_ in looping cursive. The sun squatting on the horizon catches against the roof of the building so it glints in the morning light, reflecting back through the quickly-vanishing grey haze of dawn. Nyx scrubs a hand down his face. He needs a shave.

“Well,” he shrugs. “I guess it’s breakfast.”

Behind him, Lunafreya says, “Nyx.”

He turns towards her and sees it too, spire of crystal jutting out of the earth, fractal sides glittering in the morning light. It rises out of the haze, utterly enormous, dominating the whole southern horizon.

And so damned close. 

She doesn’t have to say anything; he can practically hear her thinking it. How much time it will cut off their trip, how close they are, how vital it is. And she would be right. From here, by his best guess, they could make it there and back in a day, even on foot. They could bypass Lestallum all together, avoid the crowd and the possibility of being recognized and doubling back.

“Nyx,” she repeats, and when he turns to look at her she is staring at the towering shard embedded in the earth. She will walk, if need be. _Keep your duty._

He says, “Alright.”

* * *

They linger in the rest stop after everyone boards the bus again, watch it pull away from the curb and rumble west along the empty highway. The clock on the wall reads half past seven, red second hand ticking away as the sun climbs through the sky. They share a healthy breakfast of coffee and trail mix and Lunafreya charms the woman behind the counter into sharing everything about the town with them, from the best place to grab a meal (the one and only diner) to where they can stay a night for next to nothing (the trailer park back a block) to how no one comes through here except the night bus (they’re not much for tourism, apparently).

“Perhaps afterwards we might stay a few days,” Lunafreya says privately to Nyx.

“Expecting trouble?”

She favors him with a slight smile, but there is something solemn and sad in her eyes when she answers. “Yes.”

There are a hundred and one things he could say to that, promises and jokes and truths and hopes, words enough to clutter the air and make a mantle, words enough to make a rope and hang himself with them.

He presses his lips together and nods, reminds himself that he is the soldier and she is the hope of millions. (It’s hard to remember that, when she is also only a woman.)

“Whenever you’re ready, princess.”

“I am ready.”

* * *

The Disc grows as they approach, stone formation yielding to the bowl of the earth that holds it. Lunafreya’s step slows the closer they get, but she waves off his questions and concerns, marching without rest until they arrive, the sun already beginning its creep down towards the horizon. She does not speak the whole way there, gaze straight ahead, though sometimes Nyx catches her lips moving––whether in prayer or something else, he does not know.

They arrive with no fanfare. One moment they are walking over the mixed grass and rock of the Duscae region, the next Lunafreya holds her hand up and turns to him. The ground underfoot is broken, the rock blackened and worn away by time. Lunafreya breathes in deep.

“Wait for me here,” she orders, trident shimmering into existence in her hand, and every single one of Nyx’s instincts goes off in a cacophony of warning bells.

“Hang on––”

She gives him no time to argue, face set and spine straight; she looks every inch the princess she is, Oracle of the Gods. “You cannot interfere in this,” she says, wholly an order, and years of soldier’s instincts respond, jaw clenched tight and spine straightening under her gaze. “You will only be in the way.”

“I’m supposed to guard you. You said it yourself, there’ll be trouble.”

“It is not the sort your blades can protect me from.”

“Princess––”

“Nyx.” She meets his eyes. “This is my duty.”

He holds her gaze for a long moment. “Alright,” he relents. He understands, truly; he doubts neither her strength nor her power, but he’d sure as hell like to be there to protect her instead of standing at the edge of this enormous crater and gawking.

She lays a hand upon his arm, grip steady. “I will be alright,” she promises. “You know it is my path to walk.”

“I know.” 

“Then let me walk it." 

“Alone?” he can’t help but ask, and he regrets it as soon as he says it because it sounds like doubt even though it is not, and she sighs.

“For now,” she tells him, “yes.” 

“I’ll be here,” he says, and he means it in more way than one, and he hopes she understands. “Good luck, princess.”

The last he sees of her is the wheatgrass sway of her hair as she descends into the depth of the crater.

* * *

Waiting is interminable. This is nothing like the patience of waiting to strike; it is inaction, and it grates on him. He is useless up here, can do nothing but stare at the empty countryside, at the odd, distant rumble of a car.

Then the earth itself begins to shift, rolling like the sea underfoot, and he thinks, _Lunafreya is in there_ , and orders be damned, he strides into the gaping crater after her.

If she’s going to ignore his orders, he can damn well ignore hers. 

The earth burns around him, all fire and cracked stone, and he strides through it careless because Lunafreya is in here and she is alone, and perhaps his steel and stubbornness will do little against a god of stone and fire but she should not have to face this monstrosity on her own.

(He steps into the cavern and she stands tall before the Astral, speaking words that echo through bone and blood in a language he does not understand, and slowly the giant yields to her glowing light, a star in orbit around a satellite, and any lingering doubt harbored within him burns away to cinders.) 

* * *

“It is done,” she breathes afterwards, when the ground has settled and Titan sleeps again. She does not turn to look at him, though she must know he is here, watching and waiting, ready. Her grip is white-knuckled around her trident and her inner light seems dimmed within the cavern, flickering and faded beneath the earth where moonlight should not be trapped.

She takes a step and buckles, trident fading into stardust, and he is there to catch her, arm around her waist. She leans into him, trembling, and that scares him more than he will admit––in all this, he has yet to see her weak.

“Princess?”

“It is nothing,” she tells him. “The communion is draining.”

“C’mon,” he says, tamping down his worry, forcing his voice steady. “Let’s get you out of here.”

She regains her footing as they limp their way north, eventually pulling away from his support, and he lets her go without protest. There is something worn in the line of her shoulders, in the limp fall of her hair, as if a light has been doused within her, and even as night falls and they wind their tired way north again, the light of the stars does little to rekindle her brilliance. Nyx watches her with a worried eye and swallows down countless questions; she does not say a word the whole way back.

They return to town after dark, and Nyx puts Lunafreya’s earlier intel to use in finding them lodgings for the night; he pays for a caravan and half-herds the princess into it. It’s a cramped thing, with a square table jutting from one wall and a narrow couch of thick brown upholstery and a shower barely large enough to stand in and what passes for a bedroom in the back.

Luna collapses on the bed almost as soon as they arrive, and he eases her shoes off, tucks her in as best he can before shucking his layers and lying on the narrow couch, staring at her through the sliver of the doorway.

When he falls asleep, his dreams wear her face. 

* * *

Pulsing pain wakes him, thrumming in time with his heartbeat and pulling him from dreams of where the earth rises and falls like the ocean. It spiders around his eye socket, digs into the bones of his cheek and drives icepick-sharp through his temple. The skin of his hand feels brittle and tight, as if something has been wedged between muscle and skin; it tears up his arm in splintering shards.

“Fuck,” he hisses, and even the movement of his jaw sends a fresh wave of pain washing through him. He grips his wrist tight––it is fever-hot to the touch––and loses his balance, tumbling off the couch and onto his bad arm. Bullet wound and scars both flare and he cannot stifle the shout of pain as he curls forwards, arm tucked tight to his body. He presses his head against the couch and curses, eyes squeezed shut, dredging up the will to stand and search through their bag for the meds when he is still half-asleep and fuzzy with pain.

The effort feels herculean; he levers himself to his feet and stumbles to the tiny table where Cindy’s canvas bag sits. He paws through it, blind and one-handed, and eventually his fingers find the smooth bottle of painkillers. He pries the lid off, shakes a few onto the table and swallows them dry, hand braced on the plastic as he waits for them to kick in, gritting his teeth.

It feels an eternity but cannot be more than a few minutes before the steady bloom of pain fades away. He sits heavily in one of the tiny plastic chairs, left arm half-useless in his lap. In the paltry moonlight streaming through the open window he can see the angry red of the scars, flickering with unnatural inner fire and creeping across his skin. Tentatively he brushes his face, fingers finding the raised lines across his cheek and along his temple. The faint touch sends pain spiking again; he strangles a yelp and closes his eyes.

“Shit, ow,” he says to the back of his eyelids. “Fuck.”

His breathing evens slowly, hissing in and out through teeth clenched against the fading pain. He’d forgotten. Among everything, among worrying over the princess, he’d forgotten about his own mess, the lifeline between himself and Lunafreya. And even if he had remembered, exhausted as she was, he knows he would not have asked her to heal him. He may be tied to her but he refuses to force that extra burden upon her shoulders, the weight of another life. Did the kings think of that in their grand plan, of the Oracle’s duty? He doubts it. Such mortal concerns seem beyond them.

A cool hand on his wrist jolts him out of his spiraling thoughts. He blinks his eyes open to find Luna knelt before him, soft and almost ghostlike in the moonlight.

“Nyx,” she says softly, fingers tracing the lines of his scars, and her cool touch chases the pain away. “I’m so sorry, I forgot, I’m––”

“It’s alright,” he assures her. “I’m fine, you don’t have to––”

“Let me,” she insists, and he quiets as she folds her hands around his own, energy washing up his arm, cool and cleansing. When she finishes she reaches up to the side of his face, cups his cheek and closes her eyes as her hand glows, and the burning cools, unhooks from his bones and allows him to breathe again. He sighs, deep and full, and meets her eyes as the healing fades. She leaves her hand against his cheek, gentle.

“There,” she says, soft, and brushes her thumb against the thin, hidden scars. “It will hold for a while.”

“You don’t need to, you know,” he tells her.

“And leave you in pain? Do you think so little of me?”

Something in his chest leaps to hear his own words tossed back to him, almost challenging. He closes his newly-healed hand over her own, bullet wound barely twinging at the movement.

“Of course not,” he says. For a moment he is content to rest there, but then she stands, fingers tangling through his own.

“Come sleep,” she invites, and he blanches.

“The couch––” 

“Is too small for you,” she says, admonishing save for the gentle smile in her eyes. “I shall not impugn your honor, sir knight.”

“It’s not my honor I worry about,” he mumbles, and regrets it immediately, but her mouth quirks.

“It will take more than a night’s sleep to impugn my honor,” she promises. “You must rest.”

“I was resting perfectly fine on the couch.”

“Nyx.” 

“Alright, alright.” He relents, letting her tug him up and guide him through the narrow caravan. He feels boneless, wrung out and empty, which seems unfair to her because all he did today was walk and watch and she spoke with a god, but she leads him along anyways, firm and insistent, and does not let go until they are in the bedroom. It is tiny; there is space enough for the bed and nothing else.

“You’re sure about this?” he asks, hovering at the edge of the mattress while Lunafreya sits on the other side, tugging the hoodie over her head.

“We are two adults,” she says mildly when she is not obscured by large yellow typeface. “I believe we can share a bed." 

“Right.” Okay. Yeah, they’re adults. Besides, he can’t deny that he’d rather sleep here than on the small, narrow, poorly-upholstered couch.

He settles beneath the blankets, staring up at the caravan ceiling, and he hears Lunafreya’s breathing at his side and even though he does not turn to look at her he _feels_ here there, electricity humming in the space between them, and he can’t turn to lie on his side because it’s his bad arm but he cannot turn to face her either because–– because––

He closes his eyes and forces his breathing even, forces himself to relax inch by inch, and exhaustion creeps in like a thief, pulling him into a soft darkness, and he sleeps unplagued by dreams.

* * *

He wakes to warmth. Encompassing warmth, and a softness to match, and such a feeling of safety he cannot understand why his senses are telling him there is something he is missing, something he ought to be paying attention to. He cannot spare a thought for that, not when he has not felt such peace in gods know how long. The aches and pains of his body are faraway things, hazy and indistinct, and the worries of the world even more distant, and he would give almost anything for another few moments to bask in this utter calm, curled into the softness of the bed. 

Then the bed shifts, and everything shifts with it, world around him slotting into place, and he opens his eyes to find himself face-to-face with––

Oh. Oh, shit.

Luna is curled into him. Worse, he’s curved parenthetical around her, his bad arm slung over her waist, keeping her close, her head tucked beneath his chin so that he could bend his neck only a little and press his nose against the crown of her hair. The covers lie tangled around their legs, tossed off at some point during the night, but Nyx is not cold; he is warm, he is burning up and it has nothing to do with the creeping fire beneath his skin.

Well, not that kind, anyways.

For a moment all the can do is lie there, listening to the sound of her breathing, hyper aware of everything, the feel of her under his arm and the rise and fall of her chest and the smoke-and-flowers smell of her and the softness and the warmth and a vulnerability that catches somewhere in his chest and aches yearning-deep within him. He is locked in place; he does not know what to do, how to untangle himself from this. It is not so simple as escaping the confines of the bed; it is a complicated, twisted thing that sits in his chest and holds him tight and will not let him go.

But she does not need this extra complication, not when she has so much to worry over already, not when they are on the way to her wedding, so he carefully lifts his arm, biting down on a hiss of pain as it jars his shoulder, and clenches his fist tight at his side. She shifts at the moment, and he holds his breath and she stirs, eyes blinking open.

“Nyx?”

“Hi, princess.”

She blinks for a moment, soft with sleep and a little confused, and he watches as their current position dawns on her and her cheeks go pink. She pulls away rapidly, and he takes the opportunity to do the same, sitting up at the edge of the bed while she speaks, almost babbles.

“Oh, I’m so sorry, forgive me, I didn’t––”

“No, no, it’s fine, I shouldn’t have––” 

“I did not intend to make you uncomfortable.”

“I’m not! I mean, I wasn’t, it’s not–– It’s fine, everything’s fine.”

“If you are sure?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh. Alright.” He chances a look at her and there is still pink across her cheeks, framed by her sleep-mussed hair. She undoes the remains of her messy braid as she talks, combing through it with her fingers. “Did you sleep well, then?” 

“Yeah. You?"

She nods, and there does seem to be something looser in the line of her shoulders. “Yes. Better than I have in some time.”

“Oh. That’s, uh, good,” he says lamely. “Really good.” For a moment he just stares at her, watching as she neatly plaits her hair again, fingers sure and steady, and by the time she is done she has settled back into whatever mask she wears, blush faded and expression serene. He clears his throat, louder than necessary. “I’m gonna take a shower.”

“I will be here,” she replies, and there’s something in her tone that sounds like teasing, and he vanishes into the cubicle of a bathroom before he––or she––can say anything worse. 

* * *

It is short, and cold, and he feels moderately better afterwards. He takes a moment to check his face and forearm––scars silvery thin, almost invisible––and the bullet wound. It’s much further along than it has any right to be. The stitches will need to come out sooner rather than later. Probably sooner. Probably immediately.

He exits the bathroom with his shirt still slung over his shoulder and squeezes by the princess fiddling with something at the miniscule kitchen sink.

“Bathroom’s free,” he says as he shuffles past her. She drops the cup she had been filling and stares at him, and her mouth opens but no sound comes out. “If you want to use it,” Nyx adds, turning to rifle through the bag on the table, producing the pocket first aid kit and a fresh shirt. When he glances over his shoulder she’s still staring at him, lips pressed tight together. “Princess?”

“Yes, of course,” she says, turning around and marching towards the back of the caravan. Nyx sits in the tiny chair and twists his neck so he can see the neat-ish line of stitches across his arm. He clips them carefully, easing them out until he has a small pile of them sitting on the table. He tapes over the bullet wound and wraps it again, flexing his fingers. Whatever she did last night helped more than just the ring’s scar.

The shower turns on in the other room as he scoops the stitches together to throw them in the trash, wiping down the table afterwards. The clock above the door reads a quarter past eight. He sits on the couch and tilts his head back, listening to the white noise of the shower. Finally, it feels as though they have a moment to breathe. Now that Lunafreya has… done whatever it is she needed to do with the Astral, now that they are squirreled away in this little town, now that they are far away from Insomnia.

Perhaps, finally, they will be able to travel to Altissia, carefully and quietly, and they will meet up with Prince–– with King Noctis, and Lunafreya will be safe, and they will have their wedding, and––

His good mood disappears quickly as it arrived, and he sits up, stands, paces a few quick steps before forcing himself still. This has always been the plan. He is to see her safely to Altissia, safely to Noctis and everything that entails. It is why he was spared. _Keep your duty._

His stomach clenches and he clenches his jaw along with it and carefully does not think of her soft and warm against him, does not think of her standing firm and sure and facing down a god, does not think of her quiet humor or her serenity or the electric feeling under his skin that leaps free when she is around. His thoughts sketch a circle around this feeling, and he firmly shoves it away.

He has a job to perform. His personal feelings do not factor into it. He is not to look, to listen, to think.

Well, He’s always been a bit shit at following orders.

* * *

Soon after the water in the shower shuts off, Nyx catches the rumbling of a car engine outside, the low, smooth hum of a well-tuned vehicle. Luna pokes her head out of the bathroom, dressed again in the Hammerhead hoodie and cargo pants, pressing her hair dry with a towel. Nyx looks to her and a conversation passes between them in a glance. He frowns.

Something about this is wrong. The hairs on the back of his neck stand upright.

“Stay there,” he tells her, and she nods, face still as the engine cuts out just outside the door. He grabs a knife and shifts the blinds ever so slightly to peer out the window.

“Oh, _shit_.”

“Who is it?” Lunafreya asks as a car door slams.

“We have to get out of here,” Nyx says, backing up, placing himself firmly between the princess and the door.

“What? Why?”

“It’s––” His words stick in his throat, and even as he tries to explain the door crashes inwards, the whole caravan rattling with the impact.

In the frame, sunlight streaming through and throwing him into sharp silhouette, stands Ravus Nox Fleuret, Niflheim general in all his glory.

“Hello, sister,” he says, eyes fever-bright. “Have you missed me?”


	3. Transit

“Ravus! What are you doing here?”

Her voice is soft, high with shock, and it takes her longer than it ought to mask that. Her brother frowns ever so slightly.

“I’ve come to see you, of course.” He takes a step forward and Nyx shifts with him, coiled spring-tight and ready for a fight.

“That’s far enough.”

“She’s my sister,” the man protests with a frown, almost petulant. Nyx does not move, and Ravus huffs, tone dripping with impatience. “I will not harm her. If I wanted the empire to find you I’d have come with guards, soldiers.” He raises both hands, the universal gesture of surrender. “That I am here on my own is a gesture of my goodwill.” 

Nyx snorts. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t trust you.” 

Behind him, Lunafreya approaches, steps slow and booming in the narrow silence of the caravan. 

“Why have you come, Ravus?” she repeats steadily.

“To speak with you,” he echoes back, impatience fading into something Nyx could almost call earnestness. He doesn’t trust it. “Truly, sister, I wish only to talk.” 

“Talk, then,” Nyx says, a bitter invitation. Ravus does not even glance at him, gaze fixed upon Lunafreya over his shoulder.

“Alone,” he insists, and Nyx’s lip pulls back, scowl settling upon his face. The tension in the room sings, and for a moment Nyx thinks someone might do something stupid, and that person may not even be him.

“Alright,” Lunafreya allows into the humming hostility, and the moment slips past. Ravus steps back with a nod, his expression smoothing over, and Nyx turns to her.

“Lu–– Princess––” 

“Let it be, Glaive,” Ravus says, a dismissal. Nyx pays him no heed. 

“He attacked the king,” Nyx hisses, a reminder the neither of them truly needs. “He tried to take the ring, he––”

“Is my brother,” she interrupts, eyes almost pleading, and for a moment Nyx hates the lot of them. He presses his lips together.

“All I have ever done is to protect her,” Ravus says behind him, quiet, and he sounds almost bitter, and when Nyx looks back to him his face is oddly blank, except for his eyes. His eyes burn.

Nyx Ulric knows what it is to burn. 

“I swear to you, Glaive,” says Ravus. “I would die before I harmed her. I only wish to talk.”

“Nyx.” Luna lays a hand on his arm. “Trust me.”

“It’s not you I don’t trust,” he says, but it is for show; the fight has gone out of him. Lunafreya nods, half understanding and half dismissal, and Nyx stalks past Ravus, pausing only long enough to grab the man by the arm as he leaves. 

“If I hear anything––” he starts, and Ravus waves him away.

“Your loyalty is appreciated, Glaive, but such posturing has no place here. Go play soldier outside.”

He glances to Lunafreya one last time. She draws her nobility around her like armor and meets his eyes, gaze a steady promise that she knows what she is doing. It does little to assuage his doubt.

When he steps out the door, Ravus closes it behind him, and he is left alone in the yellowing light of the morning. 

Gods, but he is tired.

Morning is a slow thing today. The sun rises heavy on the horizon, throwing long grey shadows, and the tower of the Disc stands tall to the south, glinting with the light. It will be a hot day, he thinks, air already hazy. Music drifts from the gas station, twangy and upbeat, the only sound to cut the quiet.

It sets his teeth on edge.

He breathes deep, pushing his fists into the small of his back and stretching until he feels the pop, and his ribs twinge. He winces.

Behind him, quiet voices murmur in the caravan, but he cannot make out the words, nor the tone, nor the subject. He plants his feet in the dirt and breathes deep. The smell of frying things hangs heavy on the air, and his stomach growls.

He waits.

It is not long before Ravus slams through the door, shattering the silence as he clatters down the steps and storms past Nyx, shoulders tight with anger. He marches back to the car, chin high and face a mask, and only once he yanks the door open does he turn around, mouth a hard line.

“Glaive,” he growls.

“What?” Nyx snaps, shoving away a spike of fear, thoughts with Lunafreya in the caravan. Ravus takes a breath, and when he speaks again it is with a measured tone, though that does little to mask the swirling emotions beneath. He rests his metal-and-magic hand on the hood of the car, and it glints in the morning light, and Nyx remembers watching him burn.

Was it sheer luck the ring fell from his finger, or do the Lucii have a plan for him as well, Nyx wonders. Does he also feel the sharp pull of destiny crackling like ozone in the air? He must. There is too little chance in this for him to be blind to the machinations of higher powers. This whole thing stinks of gamesmanship, and they are little more than pieces on the board.

Ravus’ mouth pulls into something that could charitably be called a smile, wry and bitter, and Nyx schools his face blank.

“I know we do not and will not see eye-to-eye,” says the man. “But, please. Keep her safe. I ask you not as a soldier but as a brother.”

_This is not an order from a king to his glaive, this is a plea from one man to another._

_Keep your duty._

“I swore I would,” Nyx replies. Ravus appraises him.

“I do not seek your oath,” he says, picking words with uncommon care, and Nyx swallows back sharp retorts. “I seek the strength of your conviction. The path ahead of her is long and dangerous, but one she has chosen to walk, stubborn girl. I would rather she not walk it alone.”

Nyx huffs quietly, and for a moment thinks he almost understands Lunafreya’s elder brother. For a moment, he sees a reflection of the princess in him, and wonders what they could have been, were it not for this damned war. It is a sobering thought. “I will not abandon her.”

Ravus presses his lips together.

“No,” he says finally. “I don’t imagine you would.” 

Nyx does not dare ask what he means by that. For a moment they stare at each other, looking for–– Well, Nyx is not certain. But he believes they both find it.

Ravus nods to him and slides into the driver’s seat of his car.

“I have made arrangements for transportation,” he adds, conversational. “A car waits for you at the diner. I suggest you follow the coast through Tenebrae. You will not be stopped.”

“And we’ll have you to thank for that, I assume." 

“Yes,” says Ravus, and he slams the door shut and peels off in a cloud of exhaust, the sound of his engine fading into the distance.

“You son of a bitch,” Nyx says to his taillights, and can’t decide how much he means it. He counts a slow ten before returning to the caravan, moderately calmer. The headache pulsing behind his eyes is wholly mundane in nature.

Inside, there is a stillness to the air, a dust-and-sunlight quiet that is wholly removed from the morning freshness outside. The bedroom door is closed. Nyx suck in a deep breath and knocks on the frame.

“Enter,” says the princess, and he slides the door open to see her perched on the edge of the bed, head low and hands shaking. The sight catches in Nyx’s gut; he crosses to her in a moment and kneels before to her. Carefully, he takes hold of her trembling hands, and she tilts her head up to look at him. Her eyes are red-rimmed, and there is dampness across her cheeks. She has been crying.

“Highness?”

“I’m alright,” she tells him, and sounds like she only half believes it. She sucks in a shuddering breath, and closes her eyes, breathes out long and slow. Nyx waits, heart tight in his chest, but when she opens her eyes again her voice is steady. “I am fine.”

“Nothing personal, princess, but you don’t look fine.” 

“Ravus was… unkind about certain truths, but not wrong.” She shakes her head, almost fond, and looks towards the door. “He has always thought he knew best, simply because he was oldest. He does not see his own blindness.”

Nyx doesn’t know what to say to that, because it sounds like another older brother he knows, and the comparison sits uncomfortably his stomach. Luna meets his eyes again and smiles, a little watery but honest. “I have made my choice, and he has respected it. That is what matters.”

“What did he want?”

“To argue. And to warn me of that which I already know. It is unfortunate he came today when I am–– still tired,” she finished awkwardly, swapping out words at the last moment, and Nyx wants to push but she looks exhausted, so instead he stands, one hand still holding hers.

“How about breakfast?” he suggests with forced levity. “And your, uh, brother says he left us something at the diner.”

“A car, yes, he said. He does at least know when he is fighting a losing battle, dear Ravus.”

She allows him to help her up, and she keeps hold of his hand perhaps longer than is necessary. Nyx clears his throat and pulls away and does his best to ignore the ghost of warmth that lingers. “He came all the way out here to argue with you even though he knew you wouldn’t listen?”

“He has never been the most practical.”

“Yeah, now I see the relation.”

She hits his shoulder, and he grins, and for a moment the worry and fear and anxiety fades, and the dust-and-sunlight of the caravan seems gentle rather than suffocating, soft instead of stale. 

“I believe you mentioned food, Glaive Ulric,” she prompts with a raised eyebrow, and he sketches a bow.

“I’ll even buy, highness.”

“Truly a gentleman.”

“I try,” he shrugs, and she offers him a tiny smile, and they gather their meagre belongings and step out in search of breakfast.

* * *

Ravus wasn’t kidding about the transportation.

A sleek car sits in the parking lot. It is not so fancy as the king’s vehicles in Insomnia, but it’s still a good sight better than the dust-caked cracked-leather thing they left in smoking ruins back at the border. Within it are two packed bags, filled with fresh clothes and medicines and flashlights and Lucian gil and Niflheim credits and a dozen other small things Nyx would not think to search for until they were feeling their absence. There are even papers in the glove compartment, fake IDs so well-made he cannot tell the difference. He whistles, low.

“Maybe your brother isn’t so bad after all.”

Lunafreya only shakes her head at him and closes the car door.

They change in the diner bathroom while waiting for their food. Nyx is more than happy to shave, finally, and to change into fresh pants and–– well, it’s nice to feel human again, showered and clean, with a full cup of coffee in his hand and a warm meal in his stomach.

Luna looks better for the change as well, hair freshly braided, wearing clothes of teal and tan that are her size, though she keeps her scarf, a detail that pleases him for reasons he still stalwartly refuses to consider. It’s a losing battle, but he’s a stubborn bastard. That’s what everyone tells him, anyways.

They eat slowly, morning sun burning away the lingering anxiety, and by the time they pay and leave Luna is laughing, shining again, and her joy further loosens the knot in his chest.

They leave the town behind them, continuing the long loop around the Disc. Nyx rolls the windows down and Lunafreya fiddles with the radio, music echoing behind them as they race over miles and miles of open road, passing other vehicles only intermittently. Everything feels lighter, now, brighter, clear glass shot through with sun, as though they have left a great weight behind them––shed beneath the earth with Titan, or abandoned in that dusty, narrow caravan.

Wherever it is, Nyx is glad to be rid of it, glad to be on the road and moving again. Even if it means he owes a modicum of gratitude to Lunafreya’s brother.

“Is he always like that?” Nyx asks when the radio fades to a slow ballad. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Luna turn her head to look at him, lips thin.

“Ravus has always been quick to yield to fear, and quicker to lay blame, if that is what you mean.”

“Ouch.”

She stares out the window, speaks slowly, as if from miles away. “He has a good heart, when he remembers to use it. I hope one day he will better learn to be his own man, rather than the man made of him.”

“Right.” Nyx has known plenty like that, forged by the world into things they are not, products of this damned war. For all he might like to think himself his own person, he is still a soldier; he has too often played the part written for him. He swallows a sigh and shakes off memories of Insomnia. “You must be glad he survived, though.”

Lunafreya sighs. “Yes,” she admits. “I am glad.” 

The song on the radio changes. Luna turns it down with a trembling hand. Nyx frowns and keeps his eyes focused on the road.

“Have you any family?” 

“Besides my sister, you mean?” he asks, far more bitter than he means to be, and he winces. Luna merely hums in the shape of a confirmation, or perhaps an apology. When Nyx glances askance at her she is watching him, eyes gentle and curious, hands clasped in her lap.

“Yes. Besides your sister.”

He turns his gaze back to the road. “My mom’s still in Galahd. Uh, a couple cousins, I think. I would’ve stayed, but after Selena...” Well. Plenty changed, after Selena.

“What was she like?”

He shakes his head slightly, taking a long moment to reply, remembering. “All fire. And curious, y’know, and smart as hell. Wanted to go to school in the capital, change the world.”

Luna’s reply comes slowly, gentle. “She sounds wonderful. And lucky, to have had such a brother as yourself.”

Nyx grunts a response and shies away from memories of fire and blood and smoke and fear. It was long ago; the hole in his heart is an ugly, scabbed thing he knows better than to pick at.

On the radio someone croons about long roads and forgotten secrets, and he thumbs it off with unnecessary viciousness. For a long moment the only sound in the car is the wind whistling through the open windows. He keeps his eyes firmly set on the road, and tries to loosen his shoulders.

“He cares too, y’know,” he says, sudden, almost an apology.

“I know,” Lunafreya replies heavily. “Too much, sometimes.”

“Brothers, huh?” He looks to her with a shade of a smile, an olive branch. She returns one of her own, tired but honest. 

“Indeed,” she agrees, and they leave it at that. 

* * *

They reach Lestallum a little after midday. Lunafreya’s dogs show up, and she crouches with them while they wait for their meal. Once they have eaten and filled the tank they continue southwest, miles flying past. That evening they stay in a tiny motel, small rooms with narrow beds across the hall from each other, and in the morning they set out again.

Luna sleeps most of the trip south, the exhausted sleep of the healing. It’s a long, lonely ride to the coast. Too much time to think.

On the radio they’re airing a speech for the princess. They have been all week, speaking well of the dead. They speak of the great healer who shouldered such a heavy responsibility so young without a word of complaint, speak of a gentle princess held captive in an ivory tower, speak of a being more goddess than mortal. Nyx turns the radio off with a scowl.

They’re eulogizing a creature of their own fantasy. They forget her mischief and her stubborn-to-the-point-of-stupidity determination, her fire and ferocity. The fragile picture they’re painting forgets her spark.

Maybe that’s just as well, he thinks, glancing at her. She sleeps with her head tipped back against the seat, hair a mess and mouth open, and looks absolutely ordinary, nothing of the fairy-tale priestess the public mourns. Something in him is glad of that. Let them grieve for their figurehead. He will see the woman beneath the masks and the mantle for who she is. That truth is his.

His grip on the steering wheel tightens and he shakes the thought away, tries to untangle himself from the mess of his protectiveness and stubborn loyalty. 

It’s a hopeless case. He’s all wrapped up in her, in her duty and her destiny and her desire. He couldn’t cut himself out of it if he wanted to, and he doesn’t. It’ll hurt in the long run, he’s sure. Might have been better if he just died. But then, who would see her safe through the Empire? No, he can’t bring himself to regret a single moment of it.

He sighs. What a fucking mess this is.

* * *

They spend the night in a tiny caravan and enter Tenebrae utterly unopposed the next morning, an anticlimactic affair, and it takes him a good dozen miles or so to realize they have crossed the border. Apparently once you’ve conquered the entire continent you don’t need to set up border patrols.

Lunafreya stares resolutely out the window. To the left the sea washes in and out of view, dipping behind towering trees; to the right the forest climbs the rolling hills that crest into rocky peaks further north.

“Mother took us here,” she says as they cross over the first of the two rivers that cut deep into the mountains, ocean glittering blue where the river feeds into it. “She loved the sea.”

There’s an uncut beauty to the land, none of the rolling grasses or scorched wasteland of Lucis. Everything blooms, towers, flows; the whole land seems to move together, steady and serene and unyielding. It’s not so hard to imagine Lunafreya at home among all this, wild and calm and free and bound up all in one.

“One day it will be free again,” she says to the mountains, deep and quiet and brimming with belief that at the end of the day it will come to pass, they’ll somehow beat the empire and free the world.

Nyx keeps his eyes on the road and tries to feel as certain. 

“One day,” she repeats, and the river disappears round the bend behind them. “It has to be. We have given up too much for anything else.”

The people of Tenebrae aren’t the only ones who have given up everything, Nyx almost wants to say, but he understands the sentiment hovering behind her words and keeps silent. Lunafreya stares out the window. She does not speak again during the hours it takes to cross the narrow parcel of land between sprawling Lucis and water-bound Accordo. Tenebrae rolls past, green and ghostly, and they are ghosts within it.

* * *

The Lucian border may be unguarded but the Accordan isn’t, and they wait many long, tense minutes as the border guard checks over their papers. Ravus did his work well, though; the forgeries are the best money can buy if not better, and the guard waves them through, bored.

Nyx cannot relax until they’re well out of sight of the crossing.

Accordo is a barren land; its population dwells by the sea and so the rocky central plains lie empty, and there is nowhere to stay when the sun sets. They settle off the highway, hidden from the road by a copse of craggy trees, and there they build a small fire and lay out sleeping bags. It’s not unlike camping with the glaives, except there’s less swearing and better food. Lunafreya speaks little as he cooks, and picks at her meal once it’s ready, feet tucked tailor-style beneath her and face drawn. Nyx stares at her and she stares into the fire, a million miles away. He sets his dinner aside, bracing his elbows on his knees and frowning at her.

“Something on your mind, princess?”

She startles, meets his gaze and flicks her eyes away 

“It is nothing,” she assures him. “Only anticipation.”

“Expecting trouble?” he asks, trying for levity, but her expression remains still and distant. 

“Of course. It would be foolish not to.”

Nyx presses his lips together and ignores the small voice in his head that sounds decidedly like Crowe telling him to keep his nose out of it. “Y’know, princess, worrying about it isn’t going to change much.”

“But preparation could change the tide of this fight,” she counters.

“And what are we preparing for, exactly?” 

“For all its freedom, Altissia remains under Niflheim rule. We must speak with the secretary, make a plea for asylum.”

Nyx folds his arms. “D’you think the secretary would refuse?” He can’t imagine they would. Lunafreya Nox Fleuret is a symbol throughout the land, the Oracle. “Once you come forward, pull the whole not-dead thing––” 

She presses her lips together. “You believe the empire would let us get so far?”

That stings, actually, and the irritation slips into his voice. “That’s what I’m here for, princess. Protecting you. Remember?”

“I–– Yes. You are right. I apologize.”

Nyx stumbles. He was waiting for an argument; she’s usually so good with them. “Uh. Right. Sure.”

She picks her food, picking at it again. The fire pops and flickers between them, and everything feels askew, a bone improperly set or rubble threatening to topple or–– something. It digs into his gut, prickles at the back of his neck. That the ring’s scars are burning again doesn’t help, lines of fire hot beneath his skin. His fingers drift towards his face before he can get a grip on himself and Lunafreya catches the movement. She sighs and unfolds, moving over to kneel next to him.

“Stay still,” she murmurs, pushing his hand away to lay her own against his cheek. Nyx presses his lips together, tension loosening as she chases the pain away. He watches her work, her eyes closed and her lips moving silently, frown pulling at her brow. After a moment she moves from his cheek to his wrist, and the ache settled in his bones and tendons lessens.

“We’ll manage,” he promises, and the healing falters as her eyes flutter open so she can look at him. “I’m not saying it’ll be easy––not that any of this has been––but we’ll figure it out.”

“Your faith is something to behold,” she replies, almost to herself, and he swallows as she closes her eyes again, healing energy bleeding from her hands up his arm. When it is done she lists to the side and he braces her shoulder. She clings to his hand for a moment, knuckles white, and he holds her just as tight.

“You alright?” It’s a stupid question, but he asks anyways. She wears exhaustion like a second skin.

“I will be,” she replies, which is about as honest as she can be. He huffs.

He should let go of her. He should let go of her because this is dangerous, this is looking and listening and thinking and more. But they left propriety and good sense a thousand miles behind them, rubble in the dust with the rest of Insomnia, and he is tired of fighting. He holds on, for fear she might vanish if he does not. 

She does not let go either; she holds him with a quiet desperation, and the two of them are utterly alone in the wilds. Somewhere, the surf crashes, threatens to drown them.

What a pair they make.

“What if we fail?” she asks him, tired and small, voice almost lost beneath the crackling of the fire. He leans forwards with a sigh, and she meets him, foreheads pressed together, breath mingling. She sighs deep, his hand still clasped between her own. He runs his thumb along the the inside of her wrist.

“I don’t know,” he admits quietly. “We’ll give someone else a way to succeed, I guess.” He thinks of Crowe and Pelna, and Regis, and even Luche, and it sits heavy in his stomach. 

“They will not have sacrificed in vain,” she says as though she can read his thoughts. “Yes. You are right.”

“I am sometimes, you know.”

She huffs a laugh, and it vibrates between them, masks the slight trembling she has carried with her from the Disc. He shifts slightly, so that they are pressed side to side now, and she curls into him. Before them the fire flickers and dances, tosses shadows across the ground, and for a moment he almost tricks himself into thinking that everything is fine, that they are the only two out in the world, holding each other in the night, the surf behind them and the destination at the end of their winding road a faraway worry. 

Well. It’s a nice thought, anyways.

“I’m tired,” Luna says, and he knows she doesn’t just mean at the moment, doesn’t just mean she needs sleep. But, what is there to say to that? _Yes, I know; yeah, me too; the weight of the world is a heavy one to bear isn’t it?_ She knows all that already.

He settles for the obvious, squeezing her hand and disentangling them, and missing her warmth as soon as it is gone. “Get some rest. I’ll clear up.”

* * *

It’s another day and a half south before they reach Altissia, and after nearly two weeks of travel Nyx finds himself dreading their arrival. Keeping to the roads, even on the run, is a hundred times more enticing than the political maneuvering and complications that await them in the city. Unease sits heavy in his gut, and he’d call it paranoia but he’s spent too long fighting this damned war to ignore any instinct, much less that of impending trouble.

He misses the king’s magic. The absence unnerves him, makes him jittery; the closer they get to their uncertain destination the more he finds himself reaching for that old, familiar layer of protection. All he gets for his troubles is a driving headache and a warning flare in his hand, and he grits his teeth against it and pushes onwards.

Lunafreya’s quiet too, a tense silence that echoes through the car and grates on Nyx’s nerves. On the radio they speak of canceled weddings and dead princes and the empire and it all presses in around him, and he needs a moment to breathe, needs something else to worry about, needs–– 

They pull aside for lunch around midday, out in the middle of fucking nowhere, and Nyx slams the door behind him and takes six, twelve, twenty steps away from the car to stand out in the emptiness of northern Accordo. The land drops off sharply a hundred yards out, falls into the sea, and even here the steady pounding of the surf echoes all around. He sucks in deep breaths, air damp and heavy with salt, and stares at nothing at all. He folds his hands behind him, the familiarity of attention, and his shoulder only twinges faintly, almost healed from Luna’s regular care to his more permanent injuries. His ribs still twinge, but even that has been fading faster than is natural. Not that he’s complaining; he’ll take a quick recovery any day.

He hears her footsteps, glances to the side as she steps up next to him. Her hair is loose, light and free around her face, caught by the wind. He looks forward again, towards the curving horizon. 

“Be pretty easy to get lost out here,” he says. He doesn’t mean it, exactly, except that he does. Lunafreya’s hair dances in the corner of his eye. “Never realized how big it was.” 

Luna reaches for his hand, lacing their fingers together. Nyx swallows. 

They stand out there until the salt air settles into their skin, until their breathing matches the beating waves, and when they return to the car, he feels as though the wind has buffeted him clean and new, scrubbed away a layer of old griefs and pains.

Lunafreya rolls down her window and wraps her scarf tight around her as they race south towards Altissia.

* * *

They camp again that night, the surf an unceasing lullaby, and in the morning he wakes worn, chipped away and hollow. They strike their meagre camp and return to the road.

By midday, Altissia looms. 

Looms is the wrong word for it; it’s a shining city, and the clouds part at their arrival. The peeking sun catches on countless spires of gold and silver, bounces off white walls and brushes curving roofs. It’s a city of air and water, sparkling and blinding and limned in sunlight, a beacon after the dull grey of their journey south. Even the peaceful, prospering Insomnia barely holds a candle to this elegance and opulence. 

Nyx understands immediately why the wedding of the century was set to happen here.

Still, the marks of the empire are not entirely absent. He sees the familiar transports, the familiar troops, the familiar haggard faces of those who cannot escape into their wealth to hide from the might of Niflheim. If anything, he’s surprised a conquered city such as this be allowed to flourish so; certainly they made no attempt to spare Insomnia.

But then, Insomnia represented something, a threat Altissia can’t hope to match. The push and pull of politics has never been his strong suit; the place where politics intersect with war is far beyond him. He’s just a soldier.

Lunafreya watches the outskirts of the city pass silently. There’s no sense of success or completion; if anything, unease hangs heavy over the both of them. _See Luna safely to Altissia_ , the king asked him, but Altissia holds little safety for them.

They make it to the gate before anyone stops them, twisting road ending in portcullis and a long bridge that stretches out into the bay itself, and Nyx realizes suddenly that the city isn’t built around the water; it’s built upon it, within it. Gondolas drift down waterways and people pass upon boardwalks, and the entire thing sits like a jewel within a crown, all shining brilliance. 

So, yeah, it’s pretty impressive. 

“ID please?” asks a bored-looking gate guard, and for a moment Nyx sees another man in another city, and it takes him a moment longer than it should to fumble for the fake papers Ravus has left them. The man at the gate frowns at their IDs, glances at their faces, and hands them back.

“You can park your car in the lot,” he says, gesturing a little ways beyond the gate. “You’re free to return to it whenever you’d like. Keep your papers with you, and keep out of trouble. Welcome to Altissia.” 

They park. They step out of the car. The sea breeze kicks up salt water; it mists up against the edge of the land. Nyx slings his jacket over one shoulder and stares at the city, and Lunafreya tucks her hair behind one ear and stares with him. 

“Well,” he says, “now what?”


	4. Arrival

The palace towers above everything, the jewel in the crown of the harbor city. The afternoon sun reflects off the white and gold facade in a dazzling kaleidoscope of color, and the air smells salt-fresh, almost cloying. Neat rows of guards line the steps, and everything is blinding and sharp and exposed and it burrows under Nyx’s skin and sets his teeth on edge.

Lunafreya doesn’t falter a moment as she glides across the plaza, head held high and back straight, so Nyx trails in her wake, fingers twitchy and hackles raised. The other shoe will drop any minute, he’s sure of it. 

“Breathe,” murmurs Luna out the side of her mouth as they mount the long, low steps to the double doors. They swing open silently at their arrival, and together they pass from the beating heat of the afternoon into the cool darkness of the building, Luna’s heels against the tile the only sound to echo down the long halls.

“I am breathing,” he hisses back, eyes catching on every splintering path that branches from the main hall. “Isn’t someone going to stop us?”

As if summoned from the air itself, a man in a sharp uniform greets them at the intersection of two corridors, sketches a shallow bow and stands. “The First Secretary expects you, Lady Lunafreya.”

“It is an honor to be her guest,” Lunafreya replies with the graceful incline of her head, and Nyx falls back into the familiarity of attention, clamps his jaw shut and watches every shift and motion of the officer.

“If you will come with me. Your guard may wait here.”

Nyx opens his mouth to protest but Lunafreya beats him to it. “He must come with me.”

“My lady––”

“He will cause no trouble. But you must understand, I am a stranger in a strange land, and I would not part from him.”

The guard narrows his eyes, mouth flat, but the steady gaze of the princess is hard to argue with, and so he nods. “Very well.”

He turns on his heel and marches away, footsteps quick and loud through the halls, and Nyx quickens his pace to walk side by side with Lunafreya.

“What’s going on?” he demands, barely a hiss, and the princess replies through the corner of her mouth.

“Secretary Claustra knows to expect us.”

“Well, obviously. How?”

“Ravus is here.”

“Your brother is part of this?”

“In a manner of speaking. Everything is in place.”

They turn down a hall and Nyx picks up his pace to keep up, voice pitched low and brimming with disbelief that he doesn’t bother attempting to mask. “So we’re walking right into whatever they’ve set up?”

“Yes.”

“You trust too easily, highness.” 

“Some things must happen, no matter what those in power believe,” she replies. The quiet swallows her voice. “I will do what is asked of me.” 

Of fucking course she will. He expects no less of her.

That does nothing to soften his irritation. Or assuage his worry.

So he paces along behind her, shoulders tight, waiting for the trap to spring, and together they arrive at the tall, narrow doors of the first secretary’s office. Their guard knocks twice, sound fading in the empty hall.

From within, a woman says, “Enter.”

The guard steps forward to push the door open, and they step into the room.

* * *

It goes, in all honesty, better than Nyx expected. 

Which is not to say it went well, but that the secretary is willing to oppose the empire to house them––that she will allow this ceremony at all––speaks volumes.

It still sits poorly with Nyx. He and the princess both know they’ve exchanged the promise of one captor for another. The one-sided treaty between Accordo and Niflheim is a sword dangling from a thread above them, string waiting to be cut.

“It’s a bad deal, highness,” Nyx says quietly to her as they are marched through the building, expressionless Altissian guards leading them towards whatever semblance of a jail cell they’re being gifted with. It’s a lucky thing Lunafreya’s stubborn righteousness extends to him; Nyx does not doubt her insistence that he remain with her is the only thing that keeps him from being thrown out on the streets and left to fend for himself. 

“It is the best option we have,” she says, just as quiet, lips barely moving.

“That doesn’t mean much.”

“No,” she agrees, and that is all she can say before they halt abruptly before a pair of doors, silver-white and narrow and tall enough to fit two men. One of the guards opens them, and Nyx catches a glimpse of windows and blue before a hand pushes between his shoulder blades and he goes tripping forwards, barely catching himself.

“Do not leave this room,” says the guard behind him, and Nyx twists around in time to catch the stumbling princess, and the door clicks shut behind them, sharp and final.

“Well,” says Nyx, hands around Luna’s arms. “That went well.”

Finally alone, she drops her mask and her head. She leans against his shoulder and sighs, long and angry. Nyx stills, fights the urge to wrap his arms around her. Now that they have made it to Altissia, now that Noctis is on his way, he must learn to better mind himself.

He releases her the moment she lifts her head, steps back out of her space, and tells himself he does not see the shifting uncertainty across her face, tells himself it is for their own good, the both of them.

She has always muddied boundaries; now is the time to set them back in place.

“So, what? Now we just wait?”

“Yes. Once Noctis arrives, I will take up my duties.”

“And do what?”

“Address the people,” she answers, stepping away to the window. He half-trails her, moves close enough to see the long, long drop to the churning waves below. His mind idly catalogues the danger; there will be no escape that way. (There will be no escape at all, he belatedly reminds himself; this is a prison of their own choosing, as much as they might choose any prison.) “Return to the land of the living, give them hope as best I can.”

“I’m sure you’ll do fine,” he says, too stiff and slightly gruff. He forces himself to bend and soften. “Knowing you’re alive will do a lot of good for them. For everyone.” 

“Yes,” she says, and her heart does not quite sound in it. She presses a hand against the glass of the window pane, fingers splayed, hesitant. “It is perhaps unkind to say it but…” 

When does does not continue Nyx shifts forwards, joins her looking out over the city and the sea and the sunset. “It was nice to be dead for a while?”

Exhaustion sits heavy behind her eyes, and her smile is a frail, twisting thing. “Yes. Something like that."

“Yeah.” He sucks in a deep breath, holds in long enough to feel dizzy and blows it out, slow and steady. “Welcome back to the world, I guess.”

“I guess,” she echoes and turns back to the spread of the city, and Nyx watches the sun fall across her face. He watches how it catches against the pale of her hair and spins it flaxen, how her eyes trace the rising peaks and narrow alleys of the city, how her breath clouds against the glass, how her hands tremble slightly with the lingering tremors of Titan. He could stand here forever, he thinks, and drink her in, happy in her shadow. But she is waiting for something else, something better. She deserves something better.

He drags himself away.

To give himself something to do he pours over their glorified jail cell and finds it ridiculously rich, more suite than room. There’s a thick rug on the floor and a long, low coffee table ringed by couch and chairs, fine art upon the walls and delicate, twisting patterns carved into the baseboards. A door to one side leads to a bedroom, enormous bed crouching in the center of the room, and Nyx resigns himself to the sofa. A vase of sylleblossoms sits upon the bedside table. The bathroom has both bathtub and shower, both gilded and enormous. The closet is large enough to sleep in and is already full, much like the bags they abandoned with the car. It’s a show of power in its own way, that two prisoners be given such lavish rooms.

Though, one of those prisoners is the princess of Tenebrae and the Oracle, so perhaps it’s understandable.

In his search he finds six bugs, three motion sensors, and a camera and he knows there must be more he has missed. These subtleties and tricks have always been Pelna’s area of expertise, not his. He crushes the listening devices beneath his boot, covers the camera, and leaves the sensors where they are. Let them know they aren’t leaving the rooms; they don’t need to watching and listening to everything as well. 

Lunafreya finds him brushing the broken pieces of wiring off his hands.

“Gifts from hour hosts,” he says by way of explanation.

“They will notice the loss.”

“Let them. I left the sensors where they were.”

“A comfort, I am sure.” She drifts over to the couch, sinking into the cushions and Nyx joins her, sits in one of the chairs arrayed around the coffee table. It gives more than he’d like; he feels a little as though he is being swallowed. Lunafreya crosses her ankles and sits serenely. Nyx runs the pad of a finger across the faint raised lines of the scars spidering up his arm. Lunafreya blinks. Nyx clenches his jaw. The clock ticks.

“Is this it?” he asks finally. “We wait?”

“There is nothing else we can do.”

“Nothing?” 

She leans forwards, hair drifting into her face. “We are but pieces in this game, now. The board must be arrayed.” 

“You play a lot of chess, princess?”

Her lips quirk, humoring him. “Some.”

He hesitates. “Fancy a game?” 

Both eyebrows rise. “With you?”

“Unless you’d rather play with one of the guards.”

“No, no.” She shifts forwards, brushes her fingers over the ivory set left out on the coffee table. “I did not know you knew how to play.” 

“I know the basics. I think. Just, uh, go easy on me.”

She smiles, a proper smile for the first time since they arrived. “No promises.”

She trounces him, of course. Then she wins the next game, and the one after that, and Nyx finally admits defeat after the fourth game in a row.

“I have had plenty of time to practice,” she says in apology afterwards. 

“Yeah, yeah,” he waves off, and retreats to the open floor near the window to stretch instead, taking stock of his various injuries while the princess pokes around the room. When evening finally rolls around Luna settles cross-legged across from him and they pace through the steps of the now-familiar healing ritual. Then Nyx stretches out on the couch and drifts into an uncomfortable doze, half certain something terrible will happen while they sleep. 

Nothing does. Nothing happens at all.

* * *

In fact, for a whole six days, nothing happens. 

The week passes slow, bright and stagnant, and they grow tired of chess, and of all the variations they can think of, and of the books sitting on the table, and his patience wears thin, the waiting more exhausting than the motion because there is nowhere to go to, nothing to do, only the unbearably slow drip of passing time. He feels kindling-brittle, as though the slightest spark could send him bursting into flame.

Lunafreya weathers it with more grace, folds her hands and smoothes her expression and sits quietly, but he still catches the minute trembling, the tap tap tapping of her fingers, the way she stares at the open books in her lap and her eyes do not read the words.

They are the both of them stretched paper-thin, impatient and anxious and close to tearing.

“I had thought it would be easier,” she says over lunch on the fourth day. Outside the clouds blot out the sun and the humidity seeps into their rooms, and the food is light and less than filling.

He looks up from his fish. (That’s the other thing about living in a harbor. Everything is seafood.) “What?”

“Waiting. It has been so long…”

“Not what you were expecting, princess?”

She lays her fork next to her plate, meal only half touched. “I  thought it would be less of a worry, now that we are here, instead of… this.” 

“Yeah,” he agrees, more grunt than anything. He hadn’t thought it would be this terrible either, once they were safe. They have spent so much time confined in a space much smaller than this during their trip, the car small enough to fit in the entryway. But that was not the same; that was the open road and purpose and direction, all motion, the roll of the land beneath them and the open horizon. This is not that, this is still and sunlight-heat through glass and the pressure of eyes always watching. He feels as though he is pinned beneath a magnifying glass and might catch fire at any moment. And as any good soldier knows––

“It’s always worst right before a fight,” he says with a shrug, trying to shake the creeping discomfort from beneath his skin, and Lunafreya sighs.

“I’d rather it be over,” she admits. Nyx smiles crooked and humorless.

“Me too, princess.”

She picks her fork up again and picks around a thin sliver of bone. Nyx sullenly spears a few green beans. 

“What will you do when it is over?” she asks suddenly. It throws him; they have been dancing around a handful of topics and this numbers among them, something he thought taboo. He shoves another forkful of greens into his mouth to buy himself a moment to think, and so that he will not tell her the first thing that comes to mind.

He does not think he will make it to the end of this.

“I’d like to go back to Galahd,” he decides, halfways humoring her. “Check in on everyone there. Make sure Libertus is alright. And then… I don’t know. Not sure there’s that much space for someone like me after the war.” 

She frowns. “What do you mean?” 

“Y’know.” He stabs a couple vegetables and lays his fork down, no longer hungry. “I’ve been in this fight since I was a kid. I don’t know if I’d be much good outside of it.” 

Her face begins to fall and then goes still, and he remembers belatedly that she is the Oracle, that she has been in this fight as long as he has if not longer, that he is not the only one whose home has been lost, and he winces. 

“Sorry,” he mumbles towards his plate. Lunafreya shifts across the table, fabric of her dress rustling.

“Do not be,” she says mildly. “You hold no blame in this.” 

And he’s not certain how to respond to that.  _ This still sucks _ , seems like something of an understatement.

So instead he looks up and asks, “What about you?”

She glances away, towards the wide windows. Her hair stick to her face in the damp heat.

“I think I would also like to return home,” she says. “And then… I very much enjoyed our time traveling. Perhaps I will see more of these lands. Meet the people, offer them what help I can. Be more healer than holy woman.”

And doesn’t that sound like its own sort of paradise, direction and motion and the wide horizon. It is perhaps not the same fight-kill-protect directive of the Glaive, but to have such purpose again, that would be something of a relief. For hearth and home he swore, even if it was a vow to a traitor, even if it was dismissed by so many who swore it. To care for the hearths and homes of those who cannot protect their own, that’s what landed him in the Glaive in the first place. It would be nice, to return to that oath. 

“Sounds like a great idea, princess.”

“Yes,” she says, her expression unreadable, but it pierces straight through him, and he finds he cannot meet her gaze. His heart thrums electric in his ribcage. “Yes, I think perhaps it will be.” 

* * *

Reprise comes the sixth day of their captivity, when Secretary Claustra sends down a message requesting the princess’ company. Nyx is not invited.

Lunafreya frowns at the guard in the doorway, narrow and displeased. “She was clear in that?”

The guard nods. He’s doing a good job of hiding his discomfort but Nyx catches the bob of his throat as he swallows. “Yes, highness.”

“It’s fine,” Nyx says, and Lunafreya turns her frown to him.

“You are sure?”

“Yeah. I have a few personal things to do.”

Incredulity colors her voice. “Here?” 

He intends to do some snooping, but he doesn’t think she needs to know that. “I think I’d just get you into trouble.”

“That has yet to stop you,” she replies, and he laughs in spite of himself.

“Yeah, well. I’m trying to be a better bodyguard, highness.”

“Then you could guard me, as a bodyguard should.”

He shakes his head with a huff. “Just, trust me?”

Curiosity flickers across her face, but she lets it go with only the slightest frown. 

“Very well, then." 

They come for her not long after that, and once she has been whisked away to play the puppet part they ask of her he drifts over to examine the door.

The lock is not so hard to break, not with the shattered bits of the bugs and handful of hairpins Lunafreya has left behind. He makes short work of it, and thinks for a moment that Libertus would be proud. 

He deals with the two guards outside without a second thought, leaves them slumped against the wall and hopes the next rotation doesn’t come too soon. He doesn’t anticipate he’ll need much time for this. 

He retraces their steps carefully, weaving back towards the Secretary’s office as quickly and quietly as he can, relying on the relative emptiness of the complex more than anything as he creeps down the halls. Only once does he have to duck back behind a corner to avoid a lazy patrol, and he takes the moment waiting for them to pass brimming with envy that they can make such a slow pass as they pretend to watch the halls.

Neither of them notice as they walk past him, crammed in a nook. Amateurs.

He ducks past the hall leading to the secretary’s office itself, instead finding the nearest window, and––sparing only a moment to consider what a monumentally stupid idea this is; the princess must have worn off on him––he clambers through it and out onto the ledge.

It is not, in fact, the secretary’s office he is aiming for, but rather her aide’s office next door. He doubts he will have such a good opportunity to poke around than now, while they are occupied with Lunafreya. It’s now or never, so to speak.

There is, luckily, a balcony outside of the offices. There is, less luckily, nothing but a narrow window ledge between him and it, and the ground suddenly seems very far away, and he feels strangely naked without his weapons or the king’s magic.

Well, such regrets won’t help him now. He sucks in a deep breath and begins to inch his way towards the balcony. 

It’s slow going, toes hanging out over open air and the building warm against his back. The wind picks up when he’s halfway across, and he stops still in his tracks, palms pressed flat against the stone, sweat beading on his brow. Once it dies down, and he returns to his slow trek.

His legs are uncomfortably gelatinous by the time he reaches the balcony, and he takes a moment to kneel with the solid stone below, his heart hammering in his chest. But he has a job to do, more or less, so he picks himself up and creeps as quietly as possible towards the wide glass doors, standing against the stone where he can only just see a corner of the office, the Secretary pacing near her desk while Lunafreya sits primly in a chair. He ducks out of view before anyone glances in his way and turn to the window next to it.

It’s… Okay, it’s not the most well thought-out plan, he admits to himself as he picks the lock at the window. It slides open silently.

The office is dark, empty, but the door to the Secretary’s office is cracked open, so he will have to be quick, and he will have to be quiet. He pads across the thick carpet to the desk, rifling quietly through the papers there. Letters, memos, trade agreements; he’s looking for something more military.

The top drawer holds blank parchment and quills, the third files filled with old memos and messages. The second is locked. A promising hint.

He jimmies it open with a quiet click, sound muffled by the hum of voices from the next room over.

Bingo.

It’s not troop movements, exactly, but there are requisitions for supplies and orders to clear certain highways and a letter dating approximately a week ago, phrased like an order, informing the Altissian government that Ravus Nox Fleuret will be arriving along with––

That’s about as far as he gets before boots sound in the hall outside and the handle begins to turn. He doesn’t even stop to think; he drops the papers back in the drawer, knocking it shut as he dives for the window seconds before the door opens, scrambling through the open frame as the secretary’s aide shouts, “Hey!”

It takes all of six seconds for the balcony doors to the Secretary’s office behind him to fly open, guards sprinting through, and Nyx has a moment to think about what a monumentally  _ terrible _ idea all this has been before he leaps from the railing, throwing himself towards the window ledge.

For a few dizzying seconds he flies through the air, wind whistling past his ears, ground very far below him. Then he slams into the ledge, barely managing to catch the window frame with his fingers, ribs and arm protesting at the impact. He hangs there for a moment, catching his breath, heart pounding in his chest, before he drags himself inside, not even bothering to tug the window shut behind him as he takes off down the hall.

He makes it maybe two corridors away before a pair of guards materialize in front of him and oh,  _ now _ they’re willing to do their job.

Nyx skids to a stop, plasters a smile to his face and raises his hands, practically buzzing with adrenaline.

“Now, before anyone makes any sudden decisions––”

One of them raises the butt of her rifle and hits him across the face, and he spins down hard on one knee. As he gathers his bearings, the cool metal of the barrel settles against his neck and he goes still, heartbeat loud in his ears.

“Alright, alright,” he says slowly around a mouthful of blood, hand creeping up above his head. The other guard yanks them behind his back, and he feels the cool bite of cuffs. “Take it easy.”

The one with the gun barks out, “What are you doing here?”

“Escorting the princess.” 

“You were not given permission to leave your rooms.”

Nyx shrugs as best he can with his hands behind his back. “The details were unclear.”

The barrel digs in harder to the soft spot beneath his ear. “If you compromise this, or the First Secretary’s safety, you will wish Niflheim had gotten to you first.”

Nyx smooths his face to the blank slate of a good soldier and admits to himself that he has underestimated the Altissian guard. He’s still not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing, given their current circumstances. “Noted.”

The march him back to the rooms, and do not bother taking off the handcuffs when they lock the door behind him, and he is left alone in silence, hand bound behind him and eye swelling and a bitter taste in his mouth that has nothing to do with the copper tang of blood left from the incident with the guards.

He picks the cuffs, awkwardly fiddles with a few of Lunafreya’s hair pins until one of them clinks free and he can pry the other one off too. The ring’s scar burns beneath his fingertips. His face hurts like a motherfucker, and a visit to the bathroom shows a cut along his cheek and a creeping black eye, and he’s only just finished washing the blood away when he hears the door open and close, and when he steps back into the living room Lunafreya stands in the window with her back to him, sunlight streaming past her, small and narrow against the glass.

“Are you okay?” he asks, even though he should ask something else, ask about Noctis, or about the secretary, or––

Oh, who is he kidding? He takes a step forward. “Highness?”

“I am fine,” she says towards the ocean below. “Noctis has arrived.”

“Oh,” he says, and everything with the guard fades away, because he has spent so long waiting for news of the boy and now–– “Right.” The word catches awkwardly in his throat. He clears it.

Lunafreya hums.

“That’s good,” he says, but he cannot fully scrub the disappoint from his voice––and what sort of traitor is he, that he would be disappointed to hear his king has made it here safely. He bites his tongue, and her head cants to the side and she turns and she sees him and––

“Your face!”

He waves her away. “It’s not that bad.”

“What happened?”

“I got caught.”

She frowns in confusion, and then understanding bleeds across her face and she folds her arms. “Taking care of a few personal things?” 

“Something like that,” he shrugs.

“And was it worthwhile?”

He nods. “Yes, but not as much as I hoped. The guards are better at their jobs than I thought.”

“What were you doing?”

“Looking for information. Whatever’s going on, Niflheim’s aware of it and preparing to respond.”

Lunafreya nods slowly. “Yes. Camelia said as much.”

“What else did she say? I mean, besides that Noctis is here.”

“That they will allow the ritual to proceed.” Her voice is crisp as she says it, almost brittle. She drops her arms and crosses to the couch, and after a moment he follows her, hovering uncertainly. “It is to be tomorrow.”

So soon. “Is everything–– Are we ready? Are they?”

“Ready enough,” she says. “I will submit myself to Niflheim custody, and they will allow me to perform the ritual.” 

“The _Nifs_ are letting you do this?”  

Her face goes stony. “Camelia is playing a dangerous game. We can do little but play along.”

Nyx sits heavily, stares down at his hands for a moment. All this time keeping her out of their hands, and now… Well, that they are gearing up for something makes more sense now, at least. Friends close and enemies closer, and all that. 

He clenches his hands into fists against his thighs. “What am I supposed to do, then?”

She frowns. “What do you mean.”

“I–– This is a protection detail, highness. I’m supposed to keep you safe, not deliver you to them in a silver cage.”

“Nyx,” she says, and her voice and her face go soft, and that is worse than anything else, worse than the crisp explanation and the stony acceptance because it is just for him, and he does not deserve it, cannot deserve it. “If this is what I must do so that Noctis may fulfill his destiny, then I shall do it. For the good of all. To protect the future. It is my––”

“Duty, yeah. Right.”

“Choice,” she corrects him, and he looks up from his hands to stare at her, expression heavy but certain, and he sighs sharp and short and clenches his jaw.

“Alright,” he sighs finally, even though it isn’t, even though it never will be. “Can I at least fight? Will they let me––”  _ Will they let me stay with you? _ The words die in his throat.

“I am allowed to keep my bodyguard,” she replies, and she says it like a quote, and that leeches some of the tension from him. “I would be glad to have you at my side.”

“Then I’ll be there,” he says without thinking, all true and quiet, and it settles heavy over them, too honest. He stands sharply. “I just need to. Um.”

“I think I will retire for a little while,” she says graciously, rising in a smooth motion, but he does not miss the tremor in her hands. “I will see you for dinner.”

“Right. Yeah.”

She drifts away, bedroom door closing behind her, and he paces a nervous line in front of the window before coming to a stop, hands folded behind his back, feet placed easily, as though he were on duty, and he tries to clear his mind, tries to force is smooth and empty as the sea below.

But there are monsters in the depths, and his thoughts circle round in an endless twist, drift from Noctis to Lunfreya to duty to Niflheim to the Lucii to the ring and back again, and he finds no peace in the scene before him. So he gives up on that, leans back against the glass and slides down, legs stretched in front of him where he sits on the floor.

“Well,” he says to the empty room. “Shit.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> shifted the chapter breaks to hopefully help pacing. this should still be up in its entirely within the next week or so; the writing and revising is done so I'm just making minute edits before I post. thanks so much for all the feedback!


	5. Termination

Dinner is late, and brief, and awkward. The space between them is overfull of things he wants to say that he dare not. It feels something of a gallows meal, a last supper, and he swallows down tasteless food and does his best not to think of his regrets. He watches Lunafreya instead, back straight and eyes ahead and hands almost still, and she looks as though she has been condemned, and it rips the heart right out of him.

And he says nothing. 

Afterwards they play a half-hearted game of chess, something to pass the time, and even the joy at his victory is dampened by the heaviness in the room, the looming weight of tomorrow. Lunafreya retires not long after, and Nyx sits in the center of the couch and stares at absolutely nothing, mind a whirlwind of _Noctis ring Lucii duty Lunafreya Lunafreya Lunafreya_ until she calls him from the bedroom.

He goes in a heartbeat, knocking twice and then cracking the door open.

“Princess?” he asks, poking his head in. The light is low, one lamp spilling a golden pool across the floor, and she sits at the edge of the bed, hands clasped in her lap.

“I almost forgot,” she says by way of answer, and pats the bed next to her. “Come, let me heal you.”

He goes.

“You don’t have to––” he protests as he does, more out of familiarity than anything else, and she shushes him with a look, narrow fingers pressed to his cheek, and he hisses at the sparking pain.

His blooming black eye doesn’t help matters.

“When will you stop arguing?”

“When you stop inviting it, highness.”

“I did not invite this trouble,” she responds, fingers finding the tender bruise around his eye, and he yelps. She follows it with warmth, waves of energy chasing away the building ache, and he sinks into it, eyes falling shut.

She moves from his cheek to his hand, cupping it between her own to heal him, and he feels the slight trembling about her.

“Cold, princess?”

She hums quietly. “It will pass.”

He feels the gentle wash of the healing fade, but still she holds his hand, traces the near-invisible lines of the ring’s scarring across his palm and up his wrist, gentle and soft, and he sits next to her and does not speak a word.

Everything about her takes his breath away.

“Nyx,” she murmurs, finger stilling. She looks up to meet his eyes and he is caught there, unmoving as she hesitates, waiting. And then she says, “Stay.”

In the morning they may all be dead, pieces to be used and cast aside on this ever-changing changing game board, and he has already bested death once. He doesn’t imagine he’ll be so lucky the next time.

“Alright.” 

They ready for bed without further words. The sheets are silken, the bed comfortable, the windows open with the crashing sea a faraway lullaby below. A prison fit for a king. Lunafreya moves about it with a tired familiarity. This is not her first ivory tower.

Though it must never be said she is a helpless damsel within.

She dims the light and the bed dips with her weight. He thinks to remain proper but she does away with that almost immediately, shifting towards him so they meet in the middle, lying side by side, nearly brushing against each other, and he is all fire and hopelessness. He keeps his arms close to his sides, fists clenched, afraid to reach out.

She is a princess, with duty and destiny. He is lucky to be here with her, and he will not let the dry of his mouth or the ache of his bones or the burning of his heart ruin this.

“It will kill me,” she says quietly into the dark, and he turns to her, nose almost brushing her hair, and draws a sharp breath at the nearness.

“What?”

“All of this. Calling for the Astrals. Holding back the Scourge. My flesh is… failing.”

So. Here is the truth of it.

Nyx closes his eyes and tips his head back, breathes long and deep. Luna shifts next to him.

“I do not know if I am strong enough for this,” she murmurs, as though admitting a great secret, and he immediately opens his eyes to look at her, moonlight glowing across her face.

“You are.” Her eyes cut through him, and he hopes she sees the honest faith he harbors. “You are.”

She does not respond.

Nyx swallows. When he speaks, his voice is rougher than he would like. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Why did you not tell me the ring still preys upon you?”

Right. That. He smiles, brittle and bereft of all humor. “It didn’t seem that important.” 

“I wish you had said.”

“It wouldn’t change anything,” he replies, and he understands her own silence better. “And I wouldn’t change it for anything.” 

She closes her eyes, as if it might shield her from the truth. Nyx stares, and does not know what to do. “I’m sorry.”

“Me too,” she says softly. “Will you stay? I do not want to be alone.”

“You’re not.” And he gives in, loses the battle with himself and lifts an arm in invitation, and she folds willingly against him, still trembling, as though the quaking of the earth beneath the Disc of Cauthess has settled somewhere within her. “You’re not, Luna, I promise.”

He curves himself around her and breathes deep, and she smells like flowers and smoke, and he thinks that perhaps he is not the only one burning from the inside out.

That night he dreams of sylleblossoms and fire, and he wakes feeling scorched clean like the fields back home, ready for sowing, ready for a fresh beginning.

Luna snores quietly into his shoulder, warm and still and perfectly fit against his side, and he tries not to think that this peace has come too late. He thinks it anyways.

He presses a kiss to her forehead and gently extracts himself to prepare for the day, leaving her to wake alone.

* * *

"It's tied to you," he says into the empty silence of their wait. Soon Altissian soldiers will come and bring her to the edge of the city, and he will–– well. He’ll stand by her of course, though he doesn’t know what that means, or what will come after. "To protecting you, I mean."

She has been silent all morning, the space between them fragile, but this stirs her. "What is?" 

He wishes he had something to do with his hands. "The ring requires a life in payment," he says, eyes fixed ahead. "Slow or quick, it doesn't care. It killed Regis slowly, but it still killed him. And it wanted you, or Libertus."

"Nyx." 

"But I couldn't. Not when you believed so damned much. I mean, what am I, in the grand scheme of things?"

"I didn't know." 

"You weren't supposed to."

“I’m sorry.”

He shakes his head, looks everywhere but her, eyes tracing the room so he will not have to meet her gaze, to see whatever is there. “Don’t be. You’ve got your own destiny, highness. It was never going to be me.”

When he finally looks to her, she’s staring at him, staring into the heart of him. Her hair falls in shifting strands around her face when she shakes her head.

“You foolish man,” she says. “You foolish, foolish man.”

“What can I say?” he grins, and the smile fits strangely across his face, and it’s truer than he means it to be. She drags it out of him, somehow, that honesty, meets it with her own as if it is a fight to be won.

She meets everything as if it is a fight to be won, stand tall or be cowed, and he knows that feeling, that fierce resistance; he’s seen it often enough in his mirror, painted on the faces of his brothers in arms. He’s the last person with a right to call her on it.

He rubs a hand down his face and she’s still staring at him, still staring right through him; he’s caught and can’t get away. He doesn’t want to.

He hasn’t wanted to for a while, if he is being honest.

She is so close. He could reach out right now, set his doubts and fears aside and hold her in this sundrenched room, their opulent prison with all of Altissia spread beneath them. He could cup her cheek and draw her close, breathe in the flowers and smoke smell of her, hold her until they forget the guards outside or the monster in the water or the slow deaths crouching in their shadows. He could kiss her, crystalline and bright among the ending of the world.

Instead, someone knocks short and sharp at the door, and Nyx steps back as guards enter the room, rifles raised, and the princess stands alone in the center of the room. She raises her chin, straightens her spine.

“I am ready,” she says. “Let this be finished.”

They bracket her, march her through the room, and only once she has left do another pair of soldiers step into the room, followed by a commander of some sort. The woman frowns at him, badges of rank glinting on her sleeves.

“If you try anything like yesterday again,” she tells him steadily, “I will put a bullet in the back of your head and leave your body in the water to rot, and the princess will never know.”

“Noted,” Nyx grunts, and the woman holds out his kukris. He straps them on, relaxing into the familiar weight of them, and then the butt of a rifle smacks into the small of his back and he stumbles forwards. They lead him through the halls at a brisk pace, march him through the empty building to the empty plaza below. Evacuation has already begun; he sees no other living soul the entire way through. Even the plaza is empty, abandoned streets branching out from this central point.

His guards pass him along to a squadron of MTs, stone-silent and blank-faced, and his skin crawls. He grits his teeth, clenches his fists tight at his side, and waits.

Relief sweeps over him when Lunafreya exits the building with her own Niflheim honor guard, knot in his chest loosening. She stares down at the courtyard from the top of the steps, takes them slow and steady and heedless of the guns pointed at her. Her shoulders seem to relax upon seeing him, and she offers the smallest of nods. He returns it, and waits for her to join him, shouldering past soldiers to stand at his side.

“Ready for this, princess?”

“Yes,” she replies, and he grins, crooked and wry, and can’t imagine her giving any other answer.

“After you then, majesty.” 

She turns around, and hesitates. “Should things go ill––”

“Save it, higness. Tell me afterwards.”

“Nyx––”

“Luna. It’s alright.”

She stares at him, lips pressed together, and nods. “Very well. As you wish.” 

He shares the shade of her smile, crooked and dim. The ring’s scar across his cheek twinges with his grimace. “Thanks, princess. Good luck.”

They are not the words he wishes to leave her with, but those are private things, unfit for this, unfit for him, so he gives what he can, and turns away from her fading smile before he further regrets what cannot be.

* * *

They do not go straightaway to the altar. First, Lunafreya makes a speech, a half-hopeless thing, and Nyx watches the crowd as much as he watches her, stood to the side in a fresh uniform, familiar dark leathers cut in the Altissian style. The faces in the crowd stare up at the princess as if she is their savior.

Perhaps she is.

He sees Noctis too, young and pale and tired, and he seems to wear his father’s shadow about his shoulders, the weight of a mantle not yet accepted, ill-fitting and suffocating. The boy stares up at Lunafreya with a familiar relief, but when she meets his eyes he stands tall and sure, and Nyx sees the regal line of kings within him and understands why Regis was willing to give so much for his survival.

And then, it is time.

The altar stands above the water, built of the same white stone that makes the rest of the city and framed by arches. A soldier hands Lunafreya her trident, mark of her status and weapon of the Oracle, and it shimmers within her grasp. Nyx finds himself stopped at the base of the steps, staring up as Lunafreya readies herself, watching and waiting and swallowing away fears he cannot act upon. The MTs step away, faceless and empty, and then Lunafreya is alone. 

In silence she prays, and the whole world holds its breath.

Leviathan erupts like a geyser.

Nyx remembers Titan, remembers the shaking earth, but this is greater, wilder. Leviathan speaks with the voice of the tempest, and Lunafreya’s response is lost among the wind and water. When the Astral strikes, the whole of the city seems to shake, but the princess does not relent, only holds tighter to her trident and shouts back, all steel and faith, and Nyx cannot but stare. This is beyond him; he dare not interrupt.

But of course, it all goes to pieces. 

The blast comes from the skies, airship fire raining down from above, and Leviathan disappears back into the depths only to rear again, and Lunafreya stumbles backwards off the alter. Nyx only just manages to catch her as she stumbles, holding tight as the waves surge.

“Well?” he shouts over the roaring wind and water. “Is it done?” 

“Not yet,” she shouts back. “Noctis must–– look out!”  

Nyx turns to shelter her from the blow as the remains of the arches tumble down around them, and together they half-stumble back to shore. Already the city bears the mark of the inclement fight and weather; the metal-and-magic soldiers of Niflheim lie broken beneath a pile of stone where a building once stood.

Nyx pulls Luna behind the relative shelter of a broken wall as the booming echo of cannon fire sounds, crouching low and wiping the water from his face. 

“What do you need?” he asks her. She raises her chin.

“To go back there. To speak with Leviathan, to help Noctis.” 

“Your altar’s ruined, princess.”

“It is a formality. I do not––”

Gunfire interrupts her, shots ricocheting off the wall, and Luna yelps as stone dust showers around them.

“Upstairs!” Nyx orders, and together they make a break for the exposed stairwell, scrambling up to the second story. He grabs one of the fallen MT’s rifles as he goes, smashes open a window and returns fire until the barrage silences. Lunafreya pants against the wall, holds one hand bloody against her leg. Nyx’s stomach drops.

“Luna––”

“I am fine. It only grazed me.”

“And you want to go back out there?” he asks, gallows humor bleeding through. She does not return it.

“I must.”

He grits his teeth and nods. This is one thing they must do. Must do or die trying, because if it does not work they may well be dead anyways. War certainly does make martyrs of them. “Alright. Then we’ll get you out there.”

She rips herself a bandage from the hem of her dress while he spots the area from the window, and so sees the ship trailing smoke as it spirals down towards the city. Towards them.

Shit.

“Highness!” he shouts in warning. He holds out one hand, and she takes it as the ship skims the roof, peeling it away and leaving rubble in its wake, and he grabs her around the waist and throws them clear of the collapsing structure. 

He braces one hand on the back of her neck, twisting them in the air as they fall to shield her from the impact. They hit hard, his shoulder bearing the brunt of the fall as he pushes them into a roll, keeping her close as scattered debris rain down around them, a shower of smoke and rubble. They roll to a stop, him on top of her, a shield between her and the crumbling structure above, bracing himself as the building comes down. When everything stills he blinks the dust out of his eyes, looks down at her.

“Well,” he says, adrenaline bleeding through him, “that could have been a lot––”

“Look out!” she shouts, pushing them over again and they roll twice as a slab of concrete slams into the ground next to him. He splays out flat on his back, coughing in the dust it kicks up, heartbeat thundering in his ears. Above him, she stares down with those wide blue eyes, breathing heavily, and he is suddenly _very_ aware of the weight of her.

“Thanks,” he says, breathless. His hand is still on the back of her neck, holding her close, and she splays one hand across his chest, bracing herself.

“Are you alright?” she asks down to him, gasping for breath.

“Yeah. You?”

“I’m unharmed.” 

“Good.”

She tilts her head back to look up at the shattered roof above them, water dripping through the hole in the ceiling and already pooling on the floor. “Perhaps next time we might take the stairs.”

“Hilarious, princess.”

Above them the ceiling groans again, and they scramble up in an awkward tangle of limbs, landing more or less upright, clothes heavy with salt water but alive. Lunafreya looks behind her towards the bay, towards the monster thrashing there, and then back to him.

“Go,” he says, stepping away. “Go on, do your princess stuff. I’ll watch your back.”

“Thank you, Nyx Ulric.” She hesitates, barely half a second, almost imperceptible. Then she darts forward, presses a kiss whisper-soft against his cheek, and vanishes through the rubble before he can respond; for a long moment he lingers, fingers pressed to his cheek, skin unblemished, and he feels a burning entirely unlike the ring’s creeping magic.

Damn royalty.

He shakes himself, spares a moment to search for the rifle among the rubble, lost in their fall, and only when he has it, familiar weight in his hands, does he duck out of the crumbling building to survey the destruction of the harbor. 

Leviathan writhes in the water, and the prince––the king, rather; Nyx still stumbles over the title––is little more than a speck twisting around the creature, quick and tiny as he flashes to and fro. The erupting water that circles the harbor blocks his view beyond that, an impenetrable wall that cuts through air and stone alike, sending pieces of Altissa swirling up into the maelstrom.

And there is Lunafreya, stood upon what may have once been a sidewalk but is now more a pier than anything, narrow rail of stone jutting out into the harbor a good fifty yard from the ruined remains of the altar, trident raised as she speaks to the Astral in a language that crashes over Nyx like the waves, even as faint and far away among the roaring of the water.

That, far more than the storm, takes his breath away. She stands still and rooted as stone among the chaos, unyielding, and this feeling is not Nyx’s to feel but it fills him anyways, blinding-bright and burning.

He should have kissed her when he had the chance.

He drags his attention away from her, forces his back to her to scan the city for the empire’s troops, the wrench in their plans, the unfortunately expected complication. Nyx himself can’t say exactly what they want out of here, but he’ll be damned before he lets a single one through to the princess.

(He feels the slightest pang for the prin–– the king, but Noctis has his own men sworn to his protection; Lunafreya has nothing and no one save him.)

He almost misses the movement among the chaos, thinks it a trooper for a moment, but it moves too smoothly, too quietly, and then the figure reaches up to adjust their hat and everything clicks into focus, and Nyx watches with narrowed eyes as Ardyn Izunia slips through the no man’s land made of the ruins of Altissia.

It is as the letter in the aide’s office said. The Chancellor himself is come to Altissia.

He stares at the man, tiny across the expanse of this battlefield as he approaches from the west. Half Nyx’s attention goes to watching for dangers, and the other half follows Izunia’s steady progress towards the newly-created coastline of the city. Towards Lunafreya.

Nyx moves to match him as he goes, stalking a brisk arc to place himself squarely between the man and the princess. It’s a slow trek over damp rubble, and he crosses one, three, half a dozen MTs as he moves westwards, easily dispatched, left twitching and shorting out in the salt water.

The rifle clicks empty after the fifth, and he leaves it in the shallows, floating with the rest of the flotsam of this battle.

Izunia pays him no mind as he moves, though Nyx is hardly stealthy about his presence. As if a man called to a duel, Izunia picks his way straight towards him, and Nyx waits for him at the sea-slick boundary between water and land, ready, and wonders what exactly his play is.

Izunia smiles as he approaches, arms open wide, and it sets off a dozen warning bells in Nyx’s head, instincts trained by years of fighting. He adjusts his grip on his weapons and sets his back firmly to Lunafreya, watches Izunia with animal wariness.

“Now, please,” says Izunia above the roar of the water and the Astral. “I’d rather we speak like civilized men.”

Of course. The diplomat wants to talk.

“You’ll forgive me if I don’t believe you.”

“I am hurt,” Izunia replies, a hand pressed to his chest. “Wounded. I am not an enemy here.”

“You look like one.”

“Looks can be deceiving.”

Nyx tightens his grip on his knives, feels his skin crawl. “I’m sure.” 

Izunia’s smile falters and he steps forwards. Nyx stands his ground, eyes narrowed, and Izunia’s chin rises slightly, brim of his hat tipping back as he stares Nyx up and down, head to toe.

“Unfortunate,” he says with a shake of his head, and sounds truly regretful. “I hate to see such waste.”

Waste of what, Nyx wants to ask, but there is no time for that because Izunia strikes forwards with the speed of a snake, and there is a flash of metal in his hand, and Nyx only just manages to spin away from the strike. Izunia spins with him, follows him close and graceful as a dancer, coat spinning skirt-like around him, and Nyx blocks his second blow in a clumsy shrug and ducks low, but Izunia’s knee is there to meet him and he stumbles back, aching ribs protesting.

“I truly had hoped to avoid this,” Izunia admits sadly, as though they were talking about bad weather or canceled plans. “I do hate getting my hands messy.” 

Nyx twists back again, allows his momentum to pull him in a tight arc around Izunia and catches the man’s shoulder, daggers scoring twin lines into the thick leather of his coat but not quite breaking it before he spins out of reach. Izunia tsks in disappointment.

“Do give his majesty my regards when you see him,” he says, and leaps forwards again, faster than any man should be able to, and he strikes with force enough to send Nyx stumbling, and he gets one hand up in time to block the blow but Izunia changes trajectory at the last moment and instead he drops low, drives his fist up, and––

The blade lands between his ribs, digs deep between thick plates of leather armor and into the soft parts of him, and he stumbles at the impact, breath rushing out, and he can’t suck it back in, and for a moment everything goes white-black-grey. He goes down to one knee, swears he can feel the grate of the knife against his bones. Izunia stands above him with dispassionate disappointment.

“How unfortunate,” he says tonelessly, and Nyx stares at his boots and tells himself to get up get up get _up_. “The last of the Kingsglaive, brought so low. But then, what are you to do without a king, hmm?” 

“I’ve got a king,” Nyx spits out, and his blood falls from his lips, staining white stone red. “And he’s going to kick your ass.”

“Ah, yes. The boy. A tragedy, truly, to lose one’s father. Such weight placed upon his young shoulders.”

Nyx’s fingers tighten around his kukri, knuckles white around the black of the hilt. “You bastard––”

“Ah ah.” Izunia kneels in front of him, head shaking. His hair is a wild tangle around his face and, this close, his eyes are sunken and utterly, unnervingly flat. “I wouldn’t, if I were you.”

“You’re not going to win this.”

“I already have.” Izunia stands. “This little game of mine is far more complicated than you could ever understand. No matter what happens today, the pieces are already in motion.”

He leans down again, and Nyx tips his head back to snarl at him, but the man only grabs the hilt of his knife and _yanks_ , and for a moment the world whites out and pain burns through him.

“A pity,” he hears from a long ways away. “Such a lamentable waste. I had hoped the girl might live, but she really is too much of a nuisance.”

His heart catches in his chest.

Luna.

 _Keep your duty,_ the Lucii told him, but they do not understand, cannot not understand––he does not need their boon to follow in the princess’ footsteps; he would willingly keep this oath until death and past it. And he has, he has died for her day after day after day, and he does not regret a single moment of it.

He’ll be dead again before he lets Izunia touch a hair on her.

The man is more silhouette than shape, a quick-moving shadow against the spots clouding his vision, but Nyx has always been one for a challenge. His thick, numb fingers grip the hilt (keep your duty) of his blade and he drags (keep your duty) his arm back and (keep your duty) _throws_ ––

It whistles through the air and sinks home, and Nyx braces against the half-expected jerk of the warp but feels nothing, only the numbness in his limbs and the weight of his body, and the shuddering, sucking breaths as he gasps for air. The hazy shade of Izunia collapses and Nyx stumbles to his feet, trips towards him, one hand pressed tight to his side, palm hot and sticky with his own blood.

Izunia’s hat floats in the water just beyond the edge of the ruined boardwalk, a good half-dozen paces from the man’s body and the hilt sticking out of his back. Nyx yanks the blade free as he passes, spares him no second glance. He’s not worth the time, not when Leviathan thrashes above the city, not when the young king is fighting for his life, not when Luna is still in danger.

He grits his teeth and squints against the bleeding darkness at the edge of his sight and pushes on. The order of the Lucii rings in his ears, a death knell or a lifeline, he is not sure. _Keep your duty._

He will, damn them. He does not need their last order echoing in his ears to guard the woman he loves.

The world fades and fuzzes as he drags himself towards her, the wavering spot of her at the altar, white against the deep blue of the water, the deep grey of the clouds, the black at the edges of his vision. She is light in the darkness, the beacon that calls him home, and he will make it, he must make it, he must––

Above them the astral roars, and he tilts his head up as it thrashes in the water, sending the whole foundation of the city rocking, and he stumbles wildly, footing unsteady on the slippery stone beneath. Before him, Lunafreya leans on her trident, and he cannot make it out but he knows her grip is white-knuckled and trembling, still trembling, always trembling; she is shaking apart at the seams and he is burning from within and it’s funny, isn’t it, how they are matched even in this, even in their creeping-slow destruction.

But they are not the only things falling apart from within in this moment, and he has more dire worries than the slow-steady losses of the future. The quick-approaching losses of the present, for instance. 

The pathway leading to the altar is a dangerous thing, narrow and seawater-slick and shifting with the pounding surf, and his footing catches and he falls hard to one knee, and the fire-jolt of pain digs into his side and his knee and his arm and his ribs and he feels aflame, even among the water, but he is not there yet, he has not reached his goal, he cannot _stop_.

But he cannot continue. The water eddies red around him; his hand is heavy with the thick heat of his lifeblood where it spills from his side.

“Luna!” he shouts, hoarse and bloody over the rushing of the water, and he knows it is a last, hopeless plea, but he has had luck with such desperation in the past and he clings to that now, something that is the closest he has ever come to faith, a last prayer, _please, Luna, please, find me_.

She turns to him.

His vision wavers as she limps towards him, silvered weapon of the gods half a crutch, and the world tilts wildly, everything slipping sideways, and the water before his eyes runs red, and then she is there, white dress a ruin of salt, all seawater and sweat and blood. She presses her hand to his face, and her fingers are cold, and they tremble.

“Luna,” he says, half gasp, and he feels the blood down his chin and in his teeth when he smiles, when she drags him back onto his knees out of the rising tide. “Hey. See. Knew you could do it.”

“Nyx, Nyx, what happened, you’re bleeding––”

Words are difficult; his tongue sits flat and heavy in his mouth. “Izunia. It’s alright. He’s gone.”

“Hush, don’t talk, save your strength––”

“Wasn’t gonna let him... hurt you, princess.”

She is so close to him, hair bedraggled and dark circles under her eyes and skin sickly pale and her eyes wide and bright as the sky, and he’s glad, he’s glad he gets to see that before he died.

“Shh, quiet. Don’t you ever listen?”

“Nah,” he says, and the world around her is going dark, and the chill of the sea begins to seep into him, and it is not only the ocean-cold gripping his bones.

It’s not the first time he’s faced death head-on. All things considered, he thinks he prefers the fire. If he’s gotta go now, though, well. This isn’t so bad either. Not with Luna here.

“You say hello to the king for me,” he tells her, each word heavy as it rolls of his tongue, slow and fading.

“You can say it yourself,” she snaps back, and there’s dampness across her face that has nothing to do with the raging sea. He wipes it away with a thumb, leaves a red-brown smudge in his wake. Gods, but she’s beautiful. Even like this, she’s beautiful.

“You’ll make a good queen.”

“I don’t want to be queen,” she tells him, fierce and quiet and iron and trembling and everything in between and oh, but he should have kissed her when he had the chance. “I want you.”

And he wants to reply, he wants to tell her _yes_ and _me too_ and _always_ but he cannot, because the Astral screams above them, roars her fury to the highest heavens and the depths of the ocean and falls, crashes into the water below, and the sea rises all around them, and there is nothing, just the salt water surge, just the rushing darkness, and Lunafreya shouts as the water carries her away into the depths of the ocean, and––

(He is among the Lucii, and they stare down at him, damning, and rumble, _Keep your duty_ , and he will, until death and past, because gods above and below help him but he loves her more than he has loved anything, more than he has right to, and there is nothing he would not give for her.

He has done his duty, and they owe him this, they owe him her life, they swore it to him, and he closes his eyes among the salt and the blood and prays, _Please_ , and he throws his kukri, and the fire of the Gods sings through him, and––)

––his hand finds Luna’s and the world goes to fire and darkness around him and there is a familiar sensation of falling-flying-motion, and he holds on for all he’s worth with every last ounce of strength in his body, because he made an oath and he will not let her be swept away by the hungry ocean, not while there is still strength in him, not while he still draws breath. 

And then everything stills, and he lands hard on solid ground, shock of it rattling through his body, and the fire of the king’s magic fades away so quickly that he almost thinks it nothing more than the hallucinations of death. Except when he opens his eyes they are yards away from the newly formed shoreline, water lapping nearby, Luna coughing up saltwater next to him, kukri clenched in his hand.

His fingers relax all on their own; his body goes limp and he lies boneless on the wet stones, ground stained red beneath him. Luna is safe. He has done his duty.

He can rest now.

She scrambles to kneel next to him as he stares up at the sky, and he sees her mouth form his name, sees her repeat something over and over, but there is no sound but the rushing water, the senseless roar, and he has held fire beneath his skin but that flame cannot hold up against such relentless dousing. 

 _There_ , he thinks to the looming Kings of Lucis, bitter-proud around the exhaustion and relief. _There, she’s safe._

He thinks, for a moment, he hears a rumbling response. But perhaps that is only the crumbling city around him, falling into the sea.

Then the cold dark swallows him, and he hears nothing at all.


	6. End of the Line

> _one month later_  

Summer comes quick to Altissia, sun hot and bright above and the sea-spray a kaleidoscope of color where the light shines through the water, and if not for the constant breeze off the sea it would be unbearable.

Instead, it’s a white-silver-gold rainbow of a city, all airy arches and crystalline waterways. Save for the cranes looming like enormous creatures among the lower levels, one would never know the ruin that struck nearly a month past.

He does not need the reminders. He remembers perfectly well on his own.

It's a bad place for him, Altissia. He wears it poorly. There is nothing to fight, only masks to don, and he is too blunt a soldier to fit neatly into either the politics or the vacation of this world. More than that, it is strange to be alone. Noctis and his friends have continued north, towards Tenebrae if Secretary Claustra’s word is to be trusted, and Lunafreya has gone with them. Her brother is gone as well, along with all but the bare minimum of Niflheim troops. Life continues. It’s something of a marvel to watch it all built up again, but Nyx isn’t in the mood for marvels.

The waiting sits awkward-sharp under his skin. Or perhaps that is the Ring’s gnawing magic, his slow decay kept at bay by a careful regimen of pills and poultices proscribed by Altissian doctors who do not and cannot understand what exactly it is.

And to top it all off, Libertus won’t return his calls. 

At least, after weeks of constant supervision, he is no longer trapped in the hospital. It’s a small mercy among all this, that he may wander the city at his leisure, breathe the sea air and stare out towards Lucis and think of the king and the princess and the fallen and the dead and wonder where they are, wonder what they’re doing, wonder if they–– 

It’s a lot of thinking. Sometimes he’d like to just shut his mind off for a while, but there are precious few ways to do that. He takes to walking, feet wearing trails through the winding streets, finding familiar paths, drifting past views like paintings of the bay, standing long hours watching the ships come and go. Today is one of those days, watching the white sails bob against the blue water, disappear along the horizon, weave curious patterns around each other as their sails catch the wind. 

Thus occupied, he does not notice his visitor until they speak.

“It is a beautiful sight, is it not?”

He turns fast enough to pull at his stitches, but the pain does nothing to distract him from the vision of the princess standing at his side.

“It’s not bad,” he manages, and is only half sure he’s not hallucinating this. Lunafreya steps closer and smiles at him. She looks more solid than he remembers, eyes clear and standing tall, dressed simply in a white skirt and a blue blouse with his scarf around her neck, and if he didn’t know her he might mistake her for any tourist wandering the city in the summer months. He wets his lips. “Highness––” 

All this time thinking of what he would say if he saw her again and now he is speechless.

“I am sorry,” she says quietly. “I did not meant to leave before you woke, but there was much to do, and––”

“It’s alright,” he says, and it is, because here she is, because she came back. “You don’t have to apologize. Definitely not to me.”

“Nevertheless.”

“Well. Uh. Apology accepted.” He hesitates a moment, then offers his arm. “Walk with me?”

She takes it without question.

It is slow going. He is, for all the good the doctors have done, still injured, and now and then his side twinges to remind him, and his breath comes slow and difficult. A punctured lung will do that to you, they tell him.  

Lunafreya does not seem to mind. She tucks her arm through his and keeps pace with him, settles neatly against his side as if they were made to fit together, and he has not forgotten how much a comfort this is, how much he has longed for it these past weeks. His heart beats hot and aching in his chest.

They walk in silence until they reach a park, a small square of  green among the white and silver, and they both lean upon a neat stone railing overlooking the city and the water below. 

“Are you alright?” he asks. She shifts her grip from his elbow down to his hand where it rest against the rail, traces the silver scarring of the ring with one finger, and Nyx feels the familiar warmth of her healing. He sinks into it with a hissing sigh; he had not quite realized how deep the ache had settled until now as she draws it out of him. His hand goes limp in her open palm, and she carefully makes her way from the faded lines at his elbow to the latticework mess of too-hot scar tissue across his palm.

When she finishes, she laces their fingers together, and Nyx silently awaits her response.

“I am better than I have been,” she says, and Nyx understands that, and he doesn’t push.

“How’s the king?”

“Noctis has continued on to Gralea with his companions. I believe their stay in Tenebrae was good for them. There was… healing they needed, too. But they will be alright.” 

“Well that’s, uh, good.”

“Yes.”

Her hand trembles in his, ever so slightly. Were they not pressed skin-to-skin does does not think he would notice.

“Luna,” he says, quiet among the whispering of the trees above them, and she turns to look at him, eyes gentle. The scarf over her hair has slipped down so it floats free around her face. “What you said, during the fight, I–– Did you mean that?”

He has been turning it over and over in his mind for weeks, now. He must know, if only to put the whispers in his head to rest. 

She does not reply. She instead tugs her hand free of his and places it against his cheek. Warmth washes from her fingertips to chase away the ache that has settled deep in his bones, pulls away the heat crackling just under his skin, and when she has healed him he feels lighter for it, freer.

“Yes,” she says. “Yes, I meant it.”

Nyx wets his lips. “And your marriage?”

“I have spoken with Noctis,” she murmurs. “There will be no marriage. I do not want to be queen. I want…” She trails off, glancing away, but Nyx shifts with her, catches her gaze. “It is a hard thing,” she admits. “I have spent so long doing what is best for everyone––”

“You deserve to be happy too,” he tells her. She smiles. 

“And you, Glaive Ulric? Do you seek happiness?”

“I seek to serve my princess,” he replies, reaching for her hands. “Whatever you’d ask of me, it’s yours.”

“You truly are a foolish man,” she tells him. And she kisses him.

Warm and gentle beneath the trees, with the ocean spread below them, she kisses him, steps up into his space and reaches up on her toes and presses her lips to his, soft and certain as everything she does, and his heart thunders in his chest and he brings his hand up to her cheek and returns the kiss, loses himself in the press of her lips and the closeness of her and the smoke-and-flowers scent and he cannot think, he cannot breathe; there is only Lunafreya, princess and oracle and woman and everything in between.

He should have done this before. Should have kissed her before they raised Leviathan, before her brother found them and left her unmoored and told him to protect her, before he arose out of the ash and the fire still somehow, gloriously alive.

He has, he thinks breathlessly, so much lost time to make up for. 

He pulls back short of breath and rests his forehead to hers. “We should have done that earlier.”

“Yes,” she agrees with that smile of hers, small and clever and crinkling around her eyes, and he smiles back, a little crooked. She leans forwards to kiss him again, light and lingering, and his heart beats double-time in his chest, and electricity blooms beneath his skin and is nothing like the fire of the King’s magic.

She pulls away slowly and laces her fingers through his, long and slender, and for a moment they stand there, side by side and silent, the sea crystalline below them. She leans her head against his shoulder; her hair, stirred by the sea breeze, brushes his cheek. 

“I must return to Tenebrae,” she says quietly, staring resolutely out over the ocean. Nyx does not reply. There are a hundred things he might say but he can’t; his words stall behind his teeth and lie heavy on his tongue. Everything feels too light, too careless, and he wants nothing more than to rest here until the light fades and the air goes chill, wants to make up for all the time he has spent keeping careful distance.

Luna straightens and gently extracts her hand from his so she might tuck her hair behind one ear. She stares at him, searching, and he doesn’t know what she’s looking for but it seems she finds it, because she breathes deep and asks,

“Will you come with me?”

“Is that safe?” he asks.

“No,” she says. “But it is necessary. I have much to do.”

Her inescapable duty, yes. He knows it well.

The pact of the Lucii was meant to be chains. The cost of the ring is a life, paid now or later, quick or slow. But he gave his to Luna some time ago now, and this weight upon his shoulders is more akin to wings; it lifts him, gives him purpose.

He takes her hand carefully, and her eyes shine beneath the canopy of green, and the sea crashing far below them is the steady beat of his heart, and for the first time in a long while now he feels settled in his skin.

He has been fighting this war for so long now, has wondered what he would do when faced with some semblance of peace. This, though. This isn’t so bad.

“Yeah, princess,” he says, and smile is the creeping dawn after a long night. “Yeah, I’ll come. Anywhere. As long as you’ll have me.”

She seals his oath with a kiss, a promise of her own, and perhaps it is duty, but there is a freedom in it too, a choice. He chooses her, he will always choose her, and nothing in the world, no ancient kings nor immortal gods, will sway him.

He swears it.

**Author's Note:**

> WELP that's that done. I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it because boy howdy I definitely fucked myself up a bit, but in the best of ways.
> 
> the titular poem is "dark august" by derek walcott.
> 
> this 100% would not be possible without the help of [@tarydarry](http://tarydarry.tumblr.com) or [@noctlsargentum](http://noctlsargentum.tumblr.com) over on tumblr. chy and jaime, thanks for the cheerleading and letting me complain to you about the complete clusterfuck(TM) of ffxv canon. what can I say? you guys are the best.
> 
> like this? come find me on tumblr [@impossibletruths](http://impossibletruths.tumblr.com) for more ffxv feelings, among other things. thanks for reading!


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